Director of Faculty of Academic Affairs at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC), Professor Kwesi Aning, has criticised government for not initiating an early assessment of tensions in Ukraine before the invasion by Russia.

Speaking on Newsfile, Saturday, Prof. Aning explained that government should have urgently gathered intelligence from Ukraine at the initial stages where tensions were rising to avert the current situation of finding it difficult to evacuate Ghanaian nationals in Ukraine.

He urged the government to address this lacuna of intelligence gathering to prevent future occurrences.

“The ex-post facto narrative that we are now trying to get our students out and they have to go through Poland and Hungary and Belarus, it ought not to have come to that.

"The security perceptions and the threat perceptions have been clear from weeks unend… So I think it would be quite nice if someone somewhere comes to tell us whether these assessments were done otherwise, the talk about how to evacuate them is just hot air,” he stated.

 Meanwhile, the Ranking Member on Foreign Affairs Committee in Parliament, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, has disclosed that Ghanaian students in Ukraine are being transported to Slovakia, Romania and Hungary borders for evacuation.

“As we speak, they are moving to the borders that Ukraine shares with Romania, Slovakian and Hungary. They tell me that the Polish borders have become so choked, there are over fifty thousand people there, and it’s difficult to have access,” he said.

According to Ablakwa, the ongoing crisis in Ukraine should be blamed on the country’s failure to be proactive in implementing its foreign policies.

He said Ukraine’s application to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), coupled with plans to establish a military base in the country, are part of the reasons for the current attacks from Russia.

Russia had served notice many years ago, actually even during the 2014 invasion of Crimea, that they would not accept a situation where Ukraine is admitted into NATO and where the Western allies like the United States, Germany, France and Britain use Ukraine as a military base.”

“They felt threatened by how Ukraine had become so pro-west, and they felt threatened by Ukraine’s application to join NATO. There are very few countries that would accept adversaries coming so close, using a neighbouring country as a launchpad.

"Let’s remember that because of the Cold War era, you still have a lot of mistrust, a lot of bad blood. The Cold War may seem to be over, but it’s still simmering; it never really went away totally,” he stressed.