Russia

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow someone who is so knowledgeable and reasonable. I welcome the Minister to her complicated portfolio and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for bringing this important subject before us. As she explained, Russia has been on our minds for most of this year because of the theft of Crimea and the attempted isolation of eastern Ukraine. There is a clear case against Russia in international law, yet we do not seem to be able to do anything about it. There is the so-called precedent of our intervention in Kosovo, which still bothers some EU members, but it is irrelevant because that intervention was clearly based on the responsibility to protect against a clear case of genocide.

The Budapest agreement and the Council of Europe are all possibilities for dialogue, but I do not see them as reasons for prosecution. It seems unlikely that Russia will be taken to any court, except perhaps courts of arbitration over its many seized assets. Russia had no difficulty in fending off Georgia’s attempt in 2008 to take it to the International Court of Justice over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Why should Russia worry now?

The West’s only non-military weapon is sanctions. European Union sanctions on assets and individuals are having some measurable but limited effect, and there it is a trial of strength between the two powerful economies, with Russia holding the key energy card—although that card has been somewhat devalued. Will the Government do something to uncover Russian corruption in London, which has been the subject of other debates in this House previously? It somehow still escapes our anti-money-laundering legislation.

This debate is also about democratic principles, and this has been much discussed. We must be under no illusions about Russian democracy, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said. Democracy is an elastic concept. We can use it to express some theoretical Athenian objective, but around the world it is being stretched in many directions and can accompany even the worst tyrannies. The Russian state has always been an autocracy but can be described as a guided democracy. Mr Putin makes quite a good show of democracy. He has a popular mandate. He is genuinely interested in democratic principles as long as they serve the state and are created by it.

Although he is an ex-KGB officer and hardly a man of the people, there have been occasions when the President has directly engaged the people, especially in a crisis where the state has proved itself incompetent. There were, for example, the forest fires of the summer of 2010 in Nizhny Novgorod, when Putin ran the gauntlet of angry villagers—19 were killed, hundreds of homes were destroyed and fire engines ran out of water. There was the revolt at the alumina plant in Pikalyovo a year earlier, when the power station was shut down, and Putin took pleasure in humiliating the responsible oligarch, Deripaska, in front of hundreds of factory workers. These were farcical times in which the President appeared less like a tsar and more like Houdini, a showman or a skilled master of public relations.

The same theatre applies to the rule of law. The Yeltsin reforms of the judiciary, which did away with the KGB and led to so much expectation in the 1990s, were only paper thin. In his battles and power struggles with the oligarchs, the President has made a continual show of using the law while in reality he and his friends, using the old KGB techniques—as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said—have brazenly ignored or distorted the law in their favour. There has always been an inner circle around the throne, and today this consists of the oligarchs and shareholders who benefit directly from the vast wealth surrounding state-owned assets.

Under various European treaties, we are signed up to the Copenhagen principles, which summarise good governance, democracy, the rule of law and transparency. But we should not make too many assumptions about European influence on Russia. The attraction of enlargement is, or was, based on the obvious wealth of eastern European states that have recently joined or been associated with the EU. Yet, the vast majority that have not been in Europe do not see it that way. They have suffered steady economic decline, repression, unemployment and inequality. The magic of privatisation did not rub off in Russia, as communists could easily predict. Not surprisingly, they have also been antagonised by the EU’s gradual enlargement towards Russian territory, demonstrated by the confrontation of the two ideologies in eastern Ukraine. Enlargement is clearly coming to an end.

Even in Georgia, where there is great expectation of the new association agreement, there are hesitations about conditionality, and ordinary liberties that are familiar to us are still a long way off. There is no doubt that we should be rethinking our whole attitude to Russia. Does the noble Baroness accept that we have not given it enough attention in the Foreign Office, and is she satisfied that, even now, we have sufficient expertise in the FCO? Sub-Committee C of the European Union Committee, to which I belong, is currently looking at Russia and will soon produce a verdict on the EEAS’s perhaps overenthusiastic policy towards Ukraine. Perhaps this policy could not have been avoided, given the vast economic power and political influence of the EU, but it is certainly time to review it.