Ukraine

Debate between Lord Alderdice and Lord Lea of Crondall

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister had to leave for a few minutes and just spoke to me. Even in her absence, I want to pay tribute to her opening speech, which was extremely helpful and certainly laid down the approach that the Government are understandably taking.

Many other noble Lords in this debate have pointed out that what the President of Russia is doing is at worst illegal but certainly running roughshod over the wishes of people and the security and stability of the wider region. I would not add very much to the debate if I simply repeated those kinds of sentiments. Instead, I will take a different approach but I want to make very clear in doing so that, while I seek to understand some of the mistakes that we have made in the West and some of the understandings that Mr Putin and his colleagues have in the East, I do it not in any sense to excuse what he is doing but because, if we do not understand it a little better, we may continue to make even worse misjudgments than we have done to date. I rather suspect that some noble Lords will find some of the things I say uncomfortable and maybe even disagreeable, including colleagues on my own Benches.

First, it is extremely important for us to be clear about the difference between tactics and strategy. We are debating the question of Ukraine and the particular situation with Crimea. This is about a tactic of Mr Putin’s, not a strategy. The strategy is a wider issue. I have not heard much being said—except perhaps by the noble Lord, Lord Soley—about the wider approach that Mr Putin is taking and what drives him. I will come back to that in a minute.

On the tactical question of Ukraine and Crimea, we need to be very honest with ourselves. For example, when noble Lords say that it is for the people of Ukraine to decide their future democratically, it is manifestly clear that the people of Ukraine are not of one mind. The problem is that they are absolutely split down the middle, so democracy as we talk about it simply will not work. That is part of the reason we have this problem. It is not going to work, so let us not use phrases like that, which might be very reassuring in this Chamber but are meaningless in the real world outside. One of my noble friends talked about how important it is to be responsible in this Chamber because things that are said here might do damage outside. There might be some element of truth there but, frankly, I do not think many people in Russia listen to this Chamber. It has very little relevance to most of them and the way they see things. The influence it has is modest in our own country and even more modest more widely.

I heard a lot said—very sensibly, rationally and thoughtfully—about the economic issues and the energy drivers. Those are not the things that drive people in situations of conflict—otherwise we would never get into wars. In wars, everybody loses: economically, socially and in every other way. Wars do not come about because of some kind of weighing up of the calculus of economic benefit. When I listened to a number of things said about energy, trade and economic sanctions, my first thought was that that will not make any difference to Mr Putin and his colleagues because they do not make judgments on that basis. They make judgments on the basis that they believe that their great country has been humiliated and set aside by the West for a long period and they are trying—successfully —to fight back against that. That is the driver, not the economy.

The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, was, as always, excellent. One thing that he pointed out was the interconnectedness of everything. He has often rightly drawn our attention to that. That makes it very difficult to make economic sanctions work, because there are always ways around them, especially if you have an enormous country and other countries, including other members of the Security Council, prepared to play ball with you.

Let us look at the attitude of Mr Putin. It is always important to know your enemy to understand what you are dealing with. When we talk about the war in Afghanistan, we think about our intervention when we were there—at least, the most recent one. Russians think of the previous Afghanistan war, the one in which we backed the mujaheddin, sending huge amounts of weapons and materiel—and backing Osama bin Laden, of course—in order to get them out, one of the last great humiliations at the end of the Cold War. I may be wrong, but I perceive that Mr Putin is riding on the back of a nationalist tiger and saying, “We’re going to put this right in various places”. I could see it in the quartet dealing with the Israel-Palestinian problem when, for all the loud talk coming from the UN, the EU and the United States about who would talk to whom, Russia was happily talking to Hamas and Hezbollah all the way through. They just ignored what the other three said.

When we came to Syria, particularly after the intervention in Libya, it was absolutely clear from the beginning that Mr Putin was saying, “This is my red line. And, by the way, I am going to stick with mine. Now let us see what you do with yours”. What did we do? We drew lines in the sand, which is very convenient because you can always draw more lines in the sand and rub the other one out with your foot. The same mistake has been made with regard to Crimea: saying that this or that will never happen. I do not think it will be much reassurance to say that we stuck to our view in regard to the Baltic states and, three generations later, they got their freedom. That will not be much reassurance either to people in the Baltics now or to anyone else who might reasonably be fearful. Why? Because now we do not make much of a difference.

I come to the European Union. I am a strong supporter of the European Union, but I remember many arguments with some of my Liberal colleagues over the question of widening or deepening the Union. In my view, you could either deepen it and make it a real political Union—at that stage, I was very keen to do that and have a Europe of the regions rather than a Europe of nation states, and I still think that it may well have been possible—or you could widen it and make it in effect a glorified free trade area. My belief was that if you tried to do both, you would make for disaster, and I think that that is what has happened. We will not talk about the economic aspects of it, but the political aspects are that we have allowed the further widening of the European Union and encouraged others to join it because we saw it as a democratisation of the east and of the south of Europe and beyond, but at the same time many of us who supported that were talking about the importance of developing a foreign and security policy and a defence posture. How on earth could that have been seen by Russia as anything other than bringing forward military, foreign and security policy closer and closer to its borders? Was it ever going to be accepted?

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but if you take the case of Serbia and Kosovo—and it is true of many countries, surely—the Copenhagen criteria and other criteria, including the economic criteria for joining the EU, have been prized and highly sought after. That is not just skin deep; that is strategic—to use the noble Lord’s word—thinking. I ask the noble Lord to reflect on this idea that widening has had no real impact and not been a proper function of the European Union. I disagreed with Jacques Delors on this very point: I believe that widening and deepening have actually gone together.

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, that is precisely the problem which I am identifying. If we try to widen it out to states that Russia sees as being within its purview and at the same time insist that what we want is not merely a trading bloc but a political union with a common foreign and security policy, and with defence implications down the line, how could Russia see that other than as more than an economic free-trade and democratic area? It could only be perceived as a threat. We are reaping some of the problems of that approach.

We are at a dangerous place if we become more aggressive and at a dangerous place if we do not. I am reminded a little of the problem that I perceive in the policy that some of my noble friends on these Benches have espoused regarding nuclear weapons. The approach that is recommended by some says, “We won’t actually send out submarines with weapons on them unless there is a threat. We’ll keep them going out and end our continuous at-sea deterrence”. So if we find a situation now where these submarines are supposedly out and there is a threat—in a few months’ time there might be a greater threat, possibly on the Baltics or possibly somewhere else—at what point do we judge that the danger is sufficient to bring them back and put in the weapons? Is it now? Is it in a month’s time? Are we already too late? If you do that, would it not increase the militarisation of a problem that we already believe we should be de-escalating? We are in a serious problem and there is no easy answer to the dilemma that we are in.

However, I am persuaded that we need to look seriously at our strategic defence posture. I do not believe that what we have at the moment, which was largely defined on budgetary issues after the last election, is serving the purpose of seriously understanding how we deal with the chaos in the wider Middle East, across the north of Africa and below it and, increasingly, in eastern Europe. These are questions which this Chamber needs to come back and explore fully and thoughtfully because they are strategic threats, which we can ignore until the time when they come back to haunt us. Some of our friends, brothers and sisters closer to Russia, are already finding the past coming back to haunt them.