LATIKA M BOURKE: The sad and sorry saga of the Australian Embassy in Kyiv under Penny Wong

The latest excuse from Penny Wong about why Australia failed to restore its diplomatic presence in Ukraine until now since Labor was elected is the latest iteration in implausible claims.

When Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Australia joined a host of other countries in withdrawing their diplomats from the capital.

However, within months, the US, Britain, Canada — with whom Australia shared an embassy — and more than 60 other countries all returned in an act that was aimed at sending a strong message of solidarity with Kyiv and against the Russian aggressor.

By contrast, Labor kept Australia’s embassy closed and, when questioned, gave the Australian people a series of ever-changing and laughable reasons.

“It wasn’t something he asked me about,” the then junior defence minister Pat Conroy told me in an interview at the Munich Security Conference in February 2023, one year after the invasion and following his meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart in Germany when I quizzed him about the ongoing closure.

Five days later Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded in front of the world’s media that he wanted the post reopened, preferably by the Australian Ambassador riding into Kyiv on another armoured Bushmaster vehicle.

“Please come, come back but on Bushmaster, we need one more,” he said.

With that, Labor’s first justification was scotched, but still, the government insisted on ignoring the plucky Ukrainian leader’s plea and the example set by all our allies.

Instead, the federal government reached for a new extenuation and cited bureaucratic safety advice, claiming that the Ukrainian capital was somehow unsafe in a way that all our allies, including our co-workspace pals Canada, could manage.

Earlier this year, the opposition’s foreign spokesman Simon Birmingham travelled to Kyiv and vowed the Coalition would immediately reopen the post if they were to win government when the election is called sometime in the next three months.

On Wednesday this week, Penny Wong finally followed Birmingham’s lead and, at last, stepped foot on Ukrainian soil for her first-ever visit to the country as Australia’s chief diplomat.

“We’ve always said that we would open this Embassy when we were able to do so, when it was safe to do so,” she told reporters.

“And I’m just so pleased that we have got to a point where we can reopen the embassy.”

But when questioned why now, given Canada’s left-wing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the country to reopen the post in May 2022, she gave yet another questionable reason.

“Canada is a NATO member and I think there are obviously arrangements as NATO partners that, as a non-NATO partner, we’re not part of,” the minister claimed.

Ms Wong could not state what particularly rendered Australia immobile when scores of countries returned years ago to Kyiv, including equivalent Indo-Pacific NATO partners Korea and Japan, as well as ASEAN nations Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Labor government’s decision to either hide behind bureaucratic advice or complete unwillingness to use its political imprimatur to achieve an outcome has been a travesty, and embarrassment and made a mockery of our claim to “stand with Ukraine.”

And it has been completely out of line with the bulk of the Australian public, three-quarters of whom support Australian military aid to Kyiv and wanted the embassy reopened, according to polling.

Worse, it comes so late. Perhaps even too late given Ukraine may be forced to the negotiating table and concede territory to the Russians who are currently bombarding the country, as was noted at Monday’s AUKMIN talks involving Ms Wong, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and their UK counterparts Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Defence Secretary John Healey.

“We met, of course, after a weekend where we saw the Russian bombardment of Ukraine, over 100 ballistic and cruise missiles fired over the weekend from 200 drones,” Mr Healey told the reporters at the quartet’s press conference.

In truth, the security picture is probably worse today than it was in May 2022, when Australia should have reopened the post.

And the meaningful access that Australia’s Ambassadors would have had to the Ukrainian government over the last two years could have informed better levels and quality of military support than Labor first delivered after coming into office than the ageing trailers and Vietnam-era vehicles, and the spectacle of the burial of helicopters rather than donating their parts to Ukraine’s savvy engineers and so on.

Labor’s decision to reopen the embassy, on the eve of the federal election and nearly three years after the war began, is as unforgivably late as their buffet of implausible excuses and a salient reminder that when it comes to foreign policy, actions always speak louder than slogans and buzzwords.