a special committee to investigate the claims and the possible cancellation of existing agreements between the European Union and the United States concerning bank transaction information and airline passenger data. On Russia and Ukraine During the Ukraine crisis, Harms – a longtime critic of Putin – made a number of statements supporting Ukraine and criticizing Moscow. In December 2013, she addressed the thousands of Ukrainians in Maidan Nezalezhnosti protesting the regime's rejection of a pact with the European Union. In the context of European efforts to unify their political response to Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Harms claimed that “in the face of a new threat of war in Europe, EU states have indeed agreed on a joint strategy towards Russia.” In April 2015, Harms therefore sharply criticized Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece for threatening to break ranks on the EU sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis, calling his visit to President Vladimir Putin “clearly pro-Russian and anti-European.“ Harms was a member of the parliament's monitoring mission during the Ukrainian parliamentary elections in 2014, led by Andrej Plenković. On 25 September 2014 Harms, who had arrived in Moscow to witness the court trial against Nadiya Savchenko, was denied entrance to the Russian Federation and was announced as persona non grata. She was informed that her entrance to Russia could be qualified as a crime. In 2015, news media reported that Harms was indeed included in a Russian blacklist of prominent people from the European Union who are not allowed to enter the country. When Finland announced plans in 2014 to build a nuclear reactor in cooperation with Russian firm Rosatom and on the condition that Finland maintains an energy partnership with Russia over the subsequent years, Harms described the decision as "wrong". She insisted that "with a Russian partner, it is even worse," as this was "totally contrary to the EU's energy security goals, which aim to cut the EU's damaging dependency on Russian energy." Harms is fundamentally supportive of the European Commission’s 2015 proposal for an Energy Union, but warned that while reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian energy imports "we escape into the arms of Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan instead of the home-grown renewables sector." Along with other senior MEPs from the European Parliament's main groups – including Elmar Brok and Guy Verhofstadt –, Harms signed a 2016 letter to EU foreign relations chief Federica Mogherini in