It remains only for me to thank noble Lords for the cumulative wisdom that has been passed on. I very much hope that a lot of the very valuable points being made around the House will be taken on board and passed on by the Minister. In particular, I thank him for giving his assurance, as far as he is able, that effective means of communication are in place. It was important for us and other people to hear that, because they might increasingly be needed as the crisis gets worse in the months ahead. More widely, the vast majority of us want to thank the Minister personally and, through him, the Government, for standing so firm by the side of Ukraine in recent months.
Of course, there have been three dissenting voices: the noble Lords, Lord Campbell-Savours, Lord Skidelsky and Lord Balfe. With due respect, I suggest to those three noble Lords that the rest of us are not quite as far away from the points that they made as they might think. First, I, personally, strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, that we should never have got into this place in the first place. Clearly, 30 or more years ago, something went very badly wrong indeed; there was a failure of policy and diplomacy, and we find ourselves once again in a binary relationship with Russia. It is nothing less than tragic that we find ourselves here, but the fact is that we are here; we have to deal with the situation where we are now, and the situation so clearly outlined by the Minister is that a
defenceless country has been illegally, immorally and outrageously invaded by Mr Putin’s policy. Whatever the faults are on our side—and they are manifest; there is no sense of self-righteousness in this struggle at all—there is no moral equivalence. We must be wary of making a moral equivalence between innocent Ukraine and an aggressive foreign power invading it.
The second point made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was about the concessions that have to be made, which was picked up also by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. I absolutely agree, as I am sure many others would. Many of those concessions, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said, were already on the table and should perhaps already have been accepted—and they will certainly have to be accepted when negotiations come. As my noble friend Lord Skidelsky said, of course we have to push for negotiations, but it takes two to negotiate. It is no good simply wishing Mr Putin away. If he did go, we might get somebody even more extreme taking over, who thinks that Putin has not been hard enough in this war. But at the moment we are dealing with Putin, and he is going to stop only when he feels that there is nothing else to gain by pursuing this war.
As I made clear in my opening remarks, my own view is that, if the Ukrainian forces manage to advance as far as the borders of Crimea, Ukraine should certainly declare a unilateral ceasefire and wait for Mr Putin because of course, at that point, we will all be hearing the words screaming in the air: “Crisis, crisis, crisis”. However, until that point, there will be negotiations only when both sides feel that there is nothing more to achieve by warfare. Sadly, it will probably come at some point over these next few months if they both get bogged down with the winter continuing. Negotiations will have to come at some point, concessions will have to be made, and the war will come to an end.
Let us never forget the words of the Duke of Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo when he said that there is only one thing sadder than winning a war; that brings out well the tragic sense that, even if a war is won, it is part of the tragedy that we are in as human beings. There is a sad, tragic element to this. Meanwhile, within that mess that we have made as human beings, moral choices have to be made. The whole country is behind the Government at the moment in the policy they are pursuing.