My Lords, the State Duma in Moscow has just cancelled a delegation from our All-Party Parliamentary Russia Group a month from now. It so happens that I chaired the previous meeting here. Before we started the agenda, the formidable lady chair of the Duma asked me point blank, “Do you think we are a European country?”. I thought for a second and said, “Well, of course: Chekov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Shostakovich, Stravinsky”—you know, just to show how cultured I was. However, I wondered whether I should add, “Actually, no, you are not. Why are all eight of you from the United Russia party? You are not a normal European country, because we have multi-party democracy”.
The schizophrenia in Russia is very general. Putin himself wants to be acknowledged on the world stage, such as at the G8—the Olympics is an example par excellence—and not to be a pariah. There are multi- national economic facts of life—energy, whatever—and the huge role of shipping across the northern sea route from the Far East to Europe, et cetera. That internationalism is in sharp antithesis to the other half of his brain, which is demotic nationalism.
We have to try. Somebody mentioned having regard to people’s sensitivities. That is a very wise thing to say. A number of the points of the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, have great validity. Some other key points and perspectives had certainly not been made until the debate got under way. It is time to try to be constructive, as many people have said; it might sound facile. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, asked, “Why not have guarantees for the Russian minority as part of the solution?”. Yes, but we both made mistakes, did we not? It was only recently that the new Government did exactly the opposite on the question, which was highly provocative.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, that this is not the time that Russia should be thrown out of the OSCE. The Secretary-General of the United Nations could not chair a meeting at the moment because he is defending the territorial integrity of member states. However, that is highly nuanced in the case of Crimea, and I will add my two pennies on that.
I very much agreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie—I am sorry if I pronounce her name wrong. Yesterday’s proposals by the Russian Foreign Minister were rejected out of hand on the grounds that we would absolutely never accept the idea that Crimea could be either independent or part of Russia, because it must be part of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
I also very much agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, who made an excellent speech. I will qualify two points from my understanding of it. I very much agreed when he said, “Never use the word ‘never’”, but I will pick up the question of elections. I have now raised three times in the House the unsustainability of the constitution of Ukraine, which it has had for a long time. It is 50:50, a bit like the two sides in Northern Ireland, which I have mentioned. In that situation you cannot have elections in which the winner takes it all—51:49—and you certainly do not then arrest and imprison the leader of the Opposition on charges of treason. We do not want later this month—is it in May?—those sort of elections. The cart is being put before the horse as regards constitution-making.
On the talks in Northern Ireland, I am not saying that Dublin equals Moscow or anything but religion defines the situation. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans spoke about the two types of Orthodox in the east and the west. We can also look at a bit of history. Many noble Lords have mentioned history, but I will add one point. Churchill agreed with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta—aptly enough—in 1945 that the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian SSRs would become members of the United Nations, but that was rather illusory until after Gorbachev, perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. However, what was done in Yalta was to shift Poland to the west, to the Oder-Neisse line, and to shift Ukraine’s western border to the left-hand side—to the west—which has created the exact balance which we now inherit. Galicia—which also had a Roman Catholic element, going back to the Austro-Hungarian empire—became part of Ukraine because of the shift after Yalta in 1945. We therefore have a country which I will not say is slightly artificial, as that would be a very bad thing to say. However, in historical terms, as we have historical memories, it is a relatively recent country. Perhaps that is why people are all so hypersensitive.
Crimea is in a very special position. I remember hiring a car not so long ago in Simferopol, staying in Yalta and going to Balaklava. I got to the esplanade in the middle of Sevastopol and got in a launch. I paid someone some roubles and he showed me around the Russian Black Sea fleet. Only 50 yards away is the Ukrainian Black Sea fleet. You see monuments all around for all the wars that Russia fought—three major ones in defence of Sevastopol. Tolstoy was wounded there, and much of War and Peace, in terms of what it is like to fight, is from Sevastopol in 1855.
That novel is based on Sevastopol in that sense; it is almost learnt by heart, although that might be difficult, by every Russian schoolchild. The heroic defence happened not only in the 19th and early 20th century but as recently as 1941 and 1942.
In the centre of Sevastopol by the esplanade is an administrative building with a Russian flag on top of it. That has been true for a long time. As I understand it, the deal implicitly is in the treaty to have the sovereign bases, just as we have in Cyprus—that is, the naval bases in Sevastopol. But that treaty runs out in 2018, and I think that Putin has that in mind. All the Ukrainians whom we met in Kiev said, “Of course they’ll have to hand them back to Ukrainian control—we’re not going to renew that treaty”. Well, I do not need to teach anyone to suck eggs about the problem of access through the Dardanelles. Of course, Russia could build another base further along to the east, but I think that it is very committed to Sevastopol, almost as much as to the memory of Stalingrad in recent times.
Finally, I echo what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans said, that the Greek Orthodox missionaries first landed in Sevastopol—I think that I am picking up the point correctly—and, incidentally, brought the Cyrillic alphabet. Anyone who goes to Athens and gets a hang of the Cyrillic alphabet does not have too much problem trying to understand the road signs in Crimea, and it is true of the whole of the ex-USSR; everyone understands Cyrillic. So this history is terribly important.
What we have to do now is to put a lot of eggs in the basket of how a new constitution would actually work. We have to find a form of words that does not say “Never” about Ukraine but tries to acknowledge that there have been mistakes on both sides—and I have mentioned a couple of them. We have to find a constitutional formula where there is buy-in from both main parties in the ethnic or religious sense. I do not dissent from everything that the Government and the West are doing at the moment, but my instinctive reaction, for what it is worth—and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s comment on this—is that we have to do what we can to give Putin an excuse not to do something stupid in the Donbas.
We must not be too provocative. Although people may be killed in a very tragic situation—take my analogy with Northern Ireland—it does not change what you then try to do. We must recognise the rights of the two sides to be part of a united Ukraine, even with a question mark over Crimea, and ensure that Russia comes to the table. I think that Putin is now looking for that. I may be wrong but that is my instinct.
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