My Lords, we are all Ukrainians today, in the same way that we were all Czechs and Poles in the face of Hitler, we were all Berliners in the face of Stalin, and we were all Bosnians and Kosovars in the face of Milošević. We share a common humanity, and a common interest as democratic Europeans in checking invasion, imperialism and tyranny.
In Putin, we are dealing with the latest of the great dictators: part rational, part megalomaniac, a wholly cynical and brutish menace to humanity and peaceful relations between states. He may be economically weaker than Hitler and Stalin, but with a nuclear arsenal and a mastery of modern cyberwarfare, he poses threats which even they did not pose. The only solution is his departure, and the only palliative is containment and the maximum possible strength and unity among the democracies he threatens. That is all of us in Europe, starting with his neighbours but not confined to them—as we in Britain know from his chemical weapons attack in Salisbury and Russian disruption of our democratic events and institutions.
Looking back critically, the mistake we made was of demonstrating insufficient strength. The idea that it would have been right, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to force the new democracies of central and eastern Europe to be neutral when they wanted freely to join the EU and NATO, is now obviously misguided. If Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were not in the EU and NATO, what is happening to Ukraine today would probably be happening to them too, and may already have happened.
In respect of Ukraine, we clearly failed in the weakness of our response to the annexation of Crimea eight years ago. The sanctions and preventive measures we are discussing today should have been taken then. We should have moved immediately to isolate and weaken Putin in the same way that we did the equally despicable and dangerous Iranian regime after it, too, started to destabilise Europe from its borders. Part of the reason we did not—and why Ukraine did not become more integrated into the European system—was intense Russian destabilisation, which some people in high European counsels who should know better foolishly and very naively and condescendingly said was evidence of Ukraine’s unsuitability to become part of the very European institutions which might have enabled it to survive and grow as a free and independent democracy.
On the crisis we now face, every speaker in this debate has agreed that sanctions must be for real. As the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, said in his extremely able and powerful speech, for sanctions to work, they have to be far bigger and more immediate than Putin is expecting. Chancellor Scholz showed commendable leadership when he announced on the day of the invasion that Nord Stream 2 will be cancelled, but the fact that, four days later, Europe’s leaders cannot even agree to exclude Russia from SWIFT and other international payments systems, as we did Iran years ago, is a bad sign. This should happen immediately as part of a Russian trade embargo, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, obviously must include Gazprom.
Our Government have a particular responsibility to promote financial sanctions because so many of them apply to transactions and investments in London. Thousands of Putin’s cronies should have their UK assets frozen or seized. The operation in the United Kingdom of all Russian banks, financial institutions and state companies—not just a handful—should be disabled. If we could stop Napoleon trading with and through Britain, we can certainly stop Putin.
It is all the more important that we in the UK take the lead on these financial measures—at the price of real pain, as the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, said—because our continental European partners need to do the same in respect of their energy dependence on Russia, although, with our own oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, we have a vital part to play here, too. Nord Stream 2 is only the start of the change that is needed to prevent Putin holding Europe to ransom; it has to start now.
We should also offer immediate asylum to all technically qualified Russian personnel, as the United States did after 1945. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said in his immensely powerful speech, militarily and logistically, we should reassert the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5 guarantee to NATO’s 30 members, and we should support Ukrainian resistance so that Putin faces in Kyiv what Brezhnev faced in Kabul: an increasingly debilitating, costly and unpopular guerrilla war with mounting losses of Russian life and prestige.
In his heartfelt address to the Russian people yesterday, delivered in Russian, President Zelensky said:
“We know for sure that we don’t want war. Neither cold, hot, or hybrid. But, if we are threatened; if someone is trying to take away our country, our freedom, our lives … We are going to defend ourselves.”
Today, we are all Ukrainians.
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