The UK Government has been accused of "sleep-walking" into the crisis over Ukraine in a scathing report by a House of Lords committee.
Peers accused both Britain and the EU of a "catastrophic misreading" of mood by European diplomats in the run-up to the stand-off between Russia and the West.
The House of Lords' EU committee said a decline in expertise on Russia in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and other EU foreign ministries had left them ill-equipped to formulate an "authoritative response".
It said for too long the EU's relationship with Moscow had been based on the "optimistic premise" that Russia was on a trajectory to becoming a democratic country.
The result was a failure to appreciate the depth of Russian hostility when the EU opened talks aimed at establishing an "association agreement" with Ukraine in 2013.
Kiev and the West accuse Russia of arming the insurgents and sending soldiers into Ukraine - something Russian President Vladimir Putin denies.
Despite Britain's role as one of the signatories to an international agreement assuring the territorial integrity of Ukraine, the Lords' report said the Government "has not been as active or as visible as it could have been" in seeking to resolve the crisis.
The findings come as a further blow to David Cameron after Britain's former senior NATO commander, General Sir Richard Shirreff, said the Prime Minister had become a diplomatic "irrelevance" in the crisis.
In the report, committee chairman Lord Tugendhat said: "It (the committee) believes that the EU, and by implication the UK, was guilty of sleep-walking into this crisis.
"The lack of robust analytical capacity, in both the UK and the EU, effectively led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis."
A foreign office spokeswoman rejected the criticism, saying: "The UK has played a leading role in supporting Ukraine's right to chart its own future by ensuring that the EU imposed tough sanctions on Russia for seeking to dictate these choices."
The office "has strengthened its expertise on Russia and the region and will continue working to ensure a strong and united response to Russian aggression", she added.
On Thursday, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon warned that EU NATO members Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania could be the next target of Russian interference.
Russia's deputy foreign minister Aleksandr Lukashevich said his comments were "beyond diplomatic ethics" and warned that the Kremlin would "find a way to react".
The row erupted as Russian bombers were spotted near to British sovereign airspace, the latest incident in a trend seen as a show of strength by Russia.
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