My Lords, I do not have any information on the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. I am aware of Russian reports that observers are there. They are certainly not under any international or umbrella organisation, the Council of Europe or the OSCE. We hope to discover more. The OSCE does have a role to play and a number of OSCE missions of one sort or another are currently either in Ukraine or in prospect, and members of those missions are British. The OSCE is an entirely appropriate framework to work with for this development.
Russia, as noble Lords know, has not always been the most constructive member of the OSCE in recent years. A number of noble Lords suggested that we may have contributed to that, and perhaps have even provoked Russia. Bill Cash MP was indeed interviewed on “Russia Today” last Thursday suggesting that it was really all the EU’s fault. I am not entirely sure that I share that view. Comparisons are also made between Kosovo and Crimea, to which I would simply say that our action in Kosovo was a response to a humanitarian situation in which there was clear evidence of ethnic cleansing and that a large number of people had been killed. It was a slow process in which we recognised that the situation was slipping out of control. None of that has happened in Crimea. The interim Government in Kiev bear no comparison with Belgrade under Milosevic and we took action in Kosovo only after years of diplomatic effort, whereas in Crimea Russia has chosen the military option first and rushed through what appears to be likely annexation.
I turn to the situation within Ukraine. My noble friend Lord Alderdice suggested that Ukraine is split down the middle. To that I would say that it is more confused, fractured, misgoverned and mistrustful. There
is some evidence that many Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine are more mistrustful of Russia now than they were even a year or two ago, with some justification. The extent to which we understand what is happening inside Ukraine is something that I suspect we need to be cautious about.
The biggest question is this: can the West’s soft power defeat Russia’s hard power? It did not in 1913-14. The suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford—who I regret to see has not remained in his place having intervened earlier—was that Russia would just shrug economic sanctions off. However, a number of noble Lords talked about the long-term costs in terms of shifting away from energy imports. Of course we are talking to other countries, including the Norwegians, about future energy supplies. The costs to Russia in terms of a deterioration in foreign investment and of its other openings are likely to be quite damaging in the long term. The question here is how long is the long term, and what damage under its current regime can Russia do first?
Let me try to cover one or two other points before I finish. I can confirm to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that it is not British policy that Ukraine should join NATO. Many of us felt that the attempt by the Bush Administration at the Bucharest summit in 2008 to push NATO enlargement as far as Georgia and Ukraine was a mistake. The Foreign Secretary has said on a number of occasions that we are not asking Ukraine to choose between Russia and the West, but I should also remind noble Lords that the EU’s approach to enlargement was not a great push by the Union. As I discovered when I first started going around eastern Europe in the 1990s, it was a reluctant response to insistent demands from our eastern European partners to gain access to our legal framework, to our economy and to our security provisions. The Estonians and others were particularly strong on that. There is a monument in Tallinn to the British squadron which preserved the independence of Estonia from the Russians in 1919, and the country still remembers that. The Poles, who have a lot of influence in this area, are also conscious that they contributed a great deal to the British effort in the Second World War, something which UKIP has now happily scrubbed out of our historical memory. The largest number of non-British pilots in the Battle of Britain were Polish, so we are not dealing with an area with which we have no historical concern or very little historical connection.
I am conscious of the time. A number of noble Lords spoke about money-laundering. We have sent a group from the National Crime Agency, the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service to help the Ukrainians in their efforts to investigate the stolen funds and we are working with them on that. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, raised some very specific questions about the Magnitsky case, which it may be appropriate for me to write to him about.
We have to reassure our east European allies. We are working with our friends and colleagues and will continue to do so as well as we can. We are in mid-crisis and do not know how or when this crisis will end, but Her Majesty’s Government will continue to work with our European and NATO partners and, more broadly,
within and through the UN. There are fundamental principles of international law and sovereignty at stake, so we will return to this issue in both Houses of Parliament as we proceed. We will of course attempt to maintain a dialogue with the Russians, difficult though that is likely to be, and to pursue a reasoned and reasonable outcome. We will offer all the technical and financial assistance we can to Ukraine, together
with our partners. As in so many international crises, there is no easy solution to be found, and we have to bend our efforts to promote an outcome that may be acceptable to all.