My Lords, President Biden recently commented that this is the most dangerous threat of nuclear war since the Cuban crisis. But are we entering a period of heightened danger, or is this Putin’s way of signalling to the West that it is time to start negotiations? Since the beginning, Mr Putin has been playing poker. If he believes that the West will not back down, he will have to up the stakes. Putin once said, “We don’t need the world without Russia”.
Getting Ukraine is Putin’s obsession. He made that clear in his 2008 NATO speech and in his 6,000-word essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. For him, the Maidan Revolution was led by Nazi putschists on behalf of Washington. As a result, war became inevitable.
Since 2020, Russia has become a totalitarian regime. Power within the system depends on access to the President, and the number of those with access has narrowed to a handful of associates. These men, known as siloviki, have enriched themselves during the 22 years of Putin’s rule. They also believe that they are in an existential struggle against the West and that, if Putin goes, they lose everything. There is no chance they will back down now. The country could collapse at any moment, but there do not seem to be any cracks among his inner circle. His only critics are the hawks, like Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, or Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, who advocate for tougher measures to win the war.
More strikingly, Putin has managed to weaponise the population so that they do not take to the street as they did in Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus. Putin relies on Dugin’s ideas of a centuries-old conflict, with Russia bearing the divine role of preserving conservative values against the evil powers of the US and Britain, both of which have constantly sought to subdue Russia, from the great game to World War I, and to Vietnam and Afghanistan. This dogma was deployed on state-owned television and the media. With the population physically and ideologically exhausted, it has been easy to indoctrinate them, particularly the older generation.
One must not forget that anyone born before 1990 had, at the age of 12, to swear an oath to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“to passionately love and cherish my Motherland, to live as the great Lenin bade us to, as the Communist Party teaches us to”
and as the laws of the pioneers of the Soviet Union required. It may no longer be an oath to Lenin, but the personality cult has been restored—to Tsar Putin. In the younger, better-informed generation, there is a general feeling that the previous 30 years have been cancelled, and that it is starting from zero. Everyone in the opposition defines themselves as anti-Putin. There is no competing belief structure to rally them. To this mix, we can add the notion of martyrdom: think of Dostoyevsky and the heroes of World War II, or the Great Patriotic War as the Russians call it.
The West may dream of Ukraine’s victory and the collapse of Putin’s regime, but Zelensky wants total victory and so does Putin. At this year’s annual victory parade Putin declared, “We will never give up”. Negotiating for a peace deal seems nay impossible, particularly since the red lines are drawn around Crimea. If Ukraine attempts to retake that militarily, it will massively increase the risk of tactical strikes. What steps are His Majesty’s Government taking to neutralise this nuclear threat?
My mother’s family fled the Bolsheviks during the revolution. I have always hoped that Russia would one day be a friend but, under Putin, this will not be possible. We need to push further. Will His Majesty’s Government go further and sanction the members of Mr Putin’s regime who have supported this dreadful war?
4.27 pm