My Lords, it is an immense privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton. I always learn a great deal from him in the field of geostrategy and defence. In fact, I am acutely aware of speaking after so many noble Lords, on all sides, who have direct ministerial experience, as well as noble and gallant Lords who have held senior office as servicemen.
In common, I suspect, with a number of noble Lords, I have had the privilege of visiting Ukraine a few times since the invasion. I never fail to be impressed by the cheerful and uncomplaining courage of local people. My last visit was to Odessa and Mykolaiv in September. Mykolaiv at that point was the front line. It was the time, as your Lordships will recall, when there was a lot of talk of the Kherson offensive, but it was a deception—what the Russians would call a maskirovka. In fact, the offensive at that time was in Kharkiv.
This was and is a very Russophone and historically Russophile part of Ukraine. We can see it in the toponymy. Why are so many of the places there called “pol”, rather than “grad”—Melitopol, Mariupol, Sevastopol or whatever? The answer goes back to Catherine the Great’s Greek plan, which energetic emperors had: to try to restore the Romanov claim to the Byzantine throne. She had a grandson who was conveniently called Constantine, and this idea of filling that part of the coastline with Russian settlers as a prelude to taking Constantinople. So, this has always been a Russian-speaking territory and, sure enough, the people there had historically voted for the pro-Russian parties. They were for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and its various successors—up until the offensive.
I had this conversation over and over again with local people in that part of Russia, saying, “When did you change? Here we are still with a big statue of Catherine the Great and all these Soviet war memorials, and a Russian-speaking population”. Odessa had its own Maidan in 2014 and could easily have gone the same way as Donetsk and Luhansk. It was only the merest chance that it did not. The answer would come: “We had an idea of the kind of Russia we thought we had a kinship with. We did not want to be absorbed by it, but we thought we had a special relationship with the other east Slav peoples. But there came a moment for all of us when it became impossible to sustain that view. For some it was the annexation of Crimea; for some it was when Putin started lobbing ordnance at Russian-speaking populations in southern Ukraine; for some it was when he started firing missiles at our own city. But we have all got to the point where we have been jolted out of our dreams. We have to accept that the real Russia, the Russian we are dealing with, is not the one with which we aspired to have some sort of kinship or special relationship.” That is what makes it so hard to imagine a negotiated settlement from here. There is not a landing zone between the minimal positions of the two sides.
As recently as April, Zelensky was talking about referendums in Donbass, and so on. That is now utterly impossible, given what people have suffered, especially, in his case, the very personal reaction he had to seeing the abominations at Bucha. When you have seen something like that, it becomes very difficult to compromise. How did Yeats put it?
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?
Just as Ukraine now has minimum terms for settlement, so does Russia. I cannot see any situation where Putin would accept a return to the status quo ante of between
2014 and last year, because that would leave him having to explain why more than 100,000 Russians have died while the economy has been set back a decade and NATO has reached the frontiers of Russia—for nothing. It is all very well people talking of realpolitik. The grand old man of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, says, “Effectively, Ukraine is now in NATO, so let’s acknowledge that and let’s have referendums in the disputed territories.” Fine, but there is literally no scenario where either side could countenance such a thing.
We in this House might have various takes and modifications. We could say that we could have a demilitarised Ukraine, international observers or a demilitarised Crimea, but it is for the birds; it makes no difference in the world where these things are being determined. So, we are back, I am afraid, to the rather grisly proposition that one side or the other has to win—that the quickest way out of this situation is that one side is defeated and the other can settle from a position of strength. When we put it in those terms, it seems pretty clear who we should want to win. Anything short of a Ukrainian victory is a victory for Putin. If the front lines freeze where they are, Putin wins. If Russia gets to absorb its new oblasts administratively, Putin wins. If the West gets tired, bored or distracted and stops sending ordnance, tanks and planes, Putin wins. If China picks this moment to invade Taiwan, Putin wins. We are in a world of suboptimal alternatives—we have been since 24 February last year—but surely the worst option is for Russian aggression to be rewarded.
Let me answer those who ask why this is our business—not many, I am glad to say, in this Chamber, but there are voices beyond. I am not a great believer in the horseshoe theory of politics, but I notice that these are particularly voices on the far left and far right. “Why is this our fight? It is nothing to do with us; it is all stirred up by NATO,” and so on. I make just two points. First, we may want to be indifferent, but Putin has never been indifferent to us. He has been targeting this country in various ways for more than a decade, and arguably on two occasions carried out what were technically acts of war against us: the attacks that accompanied the Litvinenko and Skripal murder attempts. If you deploy state force in anger in an attempt to kill somebody who is living under the Queen’s peace, that is technically an act of war, so it is not as though Russia was peacefully minding its business and not crossing our radar.
The more direct answer is this. In December 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up all the nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the USSR in exchange for an absolute commitment that it would have its territorial integrity defended within its existing frontiers—a commitment guaranteed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia. For Russia then to turn around, after Ukraine denuclearised, and invade it must rank as one of the most grotesque betrayals in history. So, as a country with honour, we have no option but to see this as our fight. I do not think we have the option of sitting back and pretending that it is a far-away country of which we know little.
My noble friend Lady Meyer said that if any of the participants in the First World War had known how it was going to end, they would not have joined in. I am
sure that is true. None the less, it is worth dwelling on the fact that the two most terrible wars we entered into in the 20th century were provoked not because our sovereignty was threatened or because we had been directly attacked, but because we took seriously our commitment to defend the independence of a friendly country. If we are not prepared to stand for the international order, for the rule of law among nations and for the right to sovereignty of a friendly people, then we are not the kind of country I thought we were.
3.35 pm