Ukraine

Earl of Oxford and Asquith Excerpts

Friday 26th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Oxford and Asquith (CB)]

My Lords, first, I warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Camoys, to this House and congratulate him on his speech.

In the course of this war, much has been said about possible territorial concessions to Russia by Ukraine as the condition for resolving the so-called stalemate of the present moment. I should like simply to sound a cautionary note. If you analyse everything said or written by Vladimir Putin since at least June 2021—more than eight months before the invasion of Ukraine—you see that he has made it very clear that he sees no reason why Ukraine should exist as a separate sovereign state; that Ukrainians and Russians are a single nation; and that the so-called artificial division between Russia and Ukraine is a ploy devised by Washington and NATO to weaken and partition Russia. In summary, like Carthage in the second century BC, Ukraine is to be destroyed.

We have known for a long time that Mr Putin has a peculiarly delusional relationship with history. It has also been argued that he has long aspired to restore the Russian empire. Today’s Russian elites certainly aspire to assert that Russia is a great power—if you do not sign up to that, you are not a member of the Russian elite—and that, without Ukraine, Russia cannot be counted as a Eurasian imperial power. In my experience, if you suggest to an otherwise reasonable-sounding member of Mr Putin’s circle that Russia would ultimately be better off if it let go of Ukraine, you will be met with a fierce snarl of denial.

Let me recall the early months of 2014, when President Yanukovych of Ukraine and some EU Foreign Ministers havered over the negotiations on a treaty with the EU that might have given Ukraine some trading benefits. What sparked the revolution at that time was when some Kyiv university students demonstrated in favour of what they called “European values”, and more specifically against Yanukovych personally: his criminal record and his thuggish regime. I was there on the streets and saw them hunted down at night and shot dead the next morning by Yanukovych’s security forces. Ukrainian society boiled over in disgust and Yanukovych fled. That revolution convinced Mr Putin to intervene in Donbass and Crimea.

Whatever mistakes the Ukrainians and their leaders had made since independence in 1991, whatever their complicity in corrupt practices and political foot-dragging, as of 2014 Ukraine society had been moving in a direction that resulted in greater prosperity, greater responsibility and more diversified individual and collective freedoms. By 2014, let alone by 2022, Ukraine in Mr Putin’s eyes was on completely the wrong course of development—a course that was entirely antithetical to the model of government and state that Mr Putin espouses and that, in his view, threatened Russia.

It is sometimes said that Mr Putin wants to rewrite history. I think a better way to describe the mentality that dominates him and his circle of ideologues is that he wants to rerun history to achieve a different or better result in his eyes. Of course, we know that that is a nonsensical absurdity: that way madness lies. But we must understand that, in the last 20 years, Mr Putin has presented himself to his population much as the Russian tsars used to—as the embodiment of Russia itself and as a quasi-mystical expression of Russian state and country. He often says that the war against Ukraine is being fought to preserve the existential integrity of Russia, as a defence against the corrupting infiltration of western ideas and values through Ukraine into Russia. He frequently details—as recently as last week to his soldiers—almost any excess he can ascribe to western cultural decline. Of course, in our terms he is talking strange nonsense. But in his terms the narrative makes sense—and Ukraine’s liberty does indeed represent an existential threat to Mr Putin himself.

We discount this mentality at our peril. The cautionary note that we must bear in mind is that, even if Ukraine were to make territorial concessions in this war, why would Mr Putin be content to remain in possession of 15% or 20% of Ukraine? What assurances could we ever accept that he would not continue to suborn and destroy the sovereignty of the whole country, as he set out to do in February 2022? It is my belief that, while hostilities may be suspended in Ukraine for a time, underlying the causes of this war there is a war under way against everything that we hold dear in Europe and among our transatlantic allies. That is the narrative which Mr Putin constantly repeats to his fellow Russians. They are told every day that in the West we have only enemies and that the West’s encouragement of Ukrainian statehood is a key element of its general anti-Russian strategy.

Russian prison guards now say to their Ukrainian prisoners, “It’s very simple; we want you to be with us, otherwise we will kill every one of you”. The truly sadistic violence and cruelty exercised by Russian soldiers and their adherents, and the kidnapping and deportation of Ukrainian children by their puppets, will take Ukrainians a long time to forget. Nor should we forget that, in its present configuration, Russia resembles a gangster state, addicted to violence, from which we can accept no assurances of security while Mr Putin’s ideology prevails. I am not convinced that territorial concessions will end this war.

My second main point relates to the future reconstruction of Ukraine. It is a theme that we often address, and it will be a major subject of our discourse for years to come. We held a large conference on the subject here in London last autumn. But do we really understand what we have in mind? I have been asked by three significant business entities from Ukraine and the Far East to give, in a week’s time, some guidance on the British Government’s position. To be honest, apart from offering some obvious platitudes, I do not really know what to say. There is very little around which any practical discussion or action can coalesce. At least in 1948, at the time of the Marshall plan, there was a General Marshall. As yet we have identified no such figure: no special envoy for Ukraine around whom we can build an institution, a managing staff, a reputable audit mechanism or a programme of prioritisation.

We know very well that there are plenty of gangsters on the loose, not just in Russia but in Ukraine. We know the present Ukrainian Government’s lamentable record of so-called corporate raiding. It is very clear that many Ukrainians are looking to the United Kingdom to provide them with guidance and support for the rule of law, security of property and enforceable titled assets. We can talk about British Government-backed insurance policies and export guarantees, but these concepts cannot operate in a vacuum. Our Government must insist that, for public and financial aid to proceed, legal reform in Ukraine must be implemented, at least in parallel if not before. Otherwise, investors will simply not be forthcoming. But in the first place we need a person who can focus and explain our thinking on the reconstruction of Ukraine.