The possibility of EU membership and the prompt signing of a comprehensive political and trade agreement between Brussels and Kyiv should be offered to Ukraine in solidarity with its citizens following Russia’s military invasion of the Crimean peninsula, MEPs have said.

In a resolution passed in Strasbourg days after Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s visit to Kyiv, the European Parliament slammed the Russian government’s action as “against international law“, an “aggression” and backed a range of sanctions against the Kremlin in response to its invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territory.

Ana Gomes, a Portuguese MEP and spokesperson on foreign affairs for the Socialists & Democrats Group, said the warnings from history were too obvious to allow the world to ignore the Russian government’s action.

The Kremlin, she said, “is playing with fire, fueling lies and bigotry about the Ukrainian revolution and resorting to the same bogus arguments that were used in the Sudetenland decades ago, with devastating consequences for Europe and the world.”

Charles Tannock, a British Conservative MEP, said the Russian state’s action had been “justified by a pack of lies and his will and keenness to revive the glories of the disappeared Soviet Union and reabsorb the east of Ukraine, no matter what the costs or the international legal violations.”

He added that the Russian military’s action had coincided with anti-Semitic attacks in Crimea, and said that the Kremlin “must understand that these sorts of aggressive actions have no place in modern Europe and will not go unpunished.”

Hans van Baalen, a Dutch liberal, warned that the Russian military’s action had completely undermined the principles of the inviolability of borders and state sovereignty.

“We have to have serious economic sanctions that will hurt Russia, unfortunately, and that will also hurt us. We should be prepared to do this because the Russian actions are not only illegal, they also destroy the Helsinki Process in which we in Europe have said that borders are to be accepted and can only be changed through international law,” he said.

The resolution on Ukraine was approved by MEPs today.

In a separate resolution on the EU’s priorities for the session of the United Nations Human Rights Council currently underway, MEPs were highly critical of regressive developments in Russia during the past two years.

The parliament condemned the ‘foreign agent’ laws targeted at civil society organisations and called on the authorities “to end these clear violations of the freedoms of expression and of association.”

A decade after Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, MEPs lamented the “lack of judicial independence” in Russia and the “continued suppression of freedom of assembly and the rights of sexual minorities.”