Ukraine: Defence Relationships

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, opened our debate today with a thoughtful and well-judged speech, and the whole House is grateful to him for initiating this debate.

Vasily Grossman once wrote:

“Every epoch has its own capital city, a city that embodies its will and soul. For several months of the Second World War that city was Stalingrad”.


In Britain, of course, it was the heavily blitzed city of Coventry. In the history of Putin’s war, that city will surely be Mariupol, and what savage irony that the descendants of the horrific brutality of Stalingrad have become its perpetrators and responsible for atrocities and war crimes. The barbaric onslaught of Mariupol led to besieged Ukrainian soldiers and civilians enduring weeks in the cellars and catacombs of the Azovstal steel plant. Putin has thought nothing about the criminality of unleashing wave after wave of death, destruction and damage including attacks on 400 hospitals and medical centres, killing civilians in railway stations and children in schools, mining fields and slaughtering animals.

Since 2014, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, reminded us, even before the depredations of Mariupol, Bucha and the rest, some 14,000 Ukrainians had already been killed, with the illegal occupation of Crimea and Donbas merely a curtain raiser. Since February, the Kremlin’s rhetoric has morphed from the pretext of protecting Russian speakers to portraying their special operation as existential, with Ukraine’s enemies hell-bent on its very destruction.

Reports of Russian fatalities vary but, whatever their number, military and political leaders must surely be recalling that wives and mothers, especially the mothers of conscripted boys who were lied to and told their sons would not be sent to the front, turned public opinion against Russian wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan. They may well do the same again. Russian people and culture have so much that we can admire, but Putin is not part of that. In July 2021, in a 5,000-word essay entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” he set out his ambitions. Mercifully shorter than the 153,000 words in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler outlined his pernicious anti-Semitic Aryan ideology, Putin positions himself with the imperial princes and tsars and whips up paranoia around anti-Russian conspiracies and foreign plots, rebutting the legitimacy of Ukraine’s borders and sovereign status.

However, Putin’s attempts—and his decision to abandon for now his failed attempts—to capture the entirety of Ukraine have led to a concentrated, deadly, bloody offensive in Donbas. The capture of Sievierodonetsk would enable domination of the supply lines. Although this hardly smacks of victory, nor does it suggest defeat—diminished and humbled, yes, but it would be absurd to underestimate Russia’s ability to dig in for a protracted conflict or to learn from its failures.

We should also be realistic about fatigue and sustained sacrifice. Despite the many pledges made to the courageous President Zelensky, some of the promised armaments have not reached Ukraine. Nor should we assume that self-interest will not get the better of domestic politics in those western countries facing rampant inflation and skyrocketing energy prices, so our commitment in the United Kingdom must be enduring and sustained.

I have some questions for the Minister. Over the past decade, €1 trillion was transferred to Russia in return for fossil fuels, but Ukraine has the second largest gas reserves in Europe and gas storage space equivalent to 27% of the European Union’s gas storage capacity. What is being done to access that and, ultimately, about the replacement of dependency with sustainability?

Returning to an issue raised by the noble Lords, Lord Liddle, Lord Cormack and Lord Foulkes, I ask: what are we going to do about the grain inside Ukraine at present? In his reply to me today, the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, said that there were 25 million tonnes of grain. How are we going to get them out? Will we help with the integration of the Ukrainian railway system to enable exports? What are we doing to open the Black Sea ports to ships from neutral countries, many of which face starvation thanks to Putin’s new Holodomor, using starvation as a weapon of war?

I return to accountability and justice. On 19 May, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for prosecution of war crimes, aggression, crimes against humanity, and genocide. It called for a special international tribunal to punish those responsible for atrocities, including indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns, forced deportations, use of banned ammunition, attacks against civilians fleeing via pre-arranged humanitarian corridors, executions and sexual violence, all of which amount to violations of international humanitarian law. Are we working with the European Union to prosecute those responsible and, if so, how? Are we systematically asking every refugee who arrives here for eyewitness accounts and statements that can be used in prosecutions? Are we preserving evidence?

On security, important speeches were made by the noble Lord, Lord West—I agreed with it entirely—and my noble friend Lord Dannatt. Will Sweden and Finland be fully integrated into NATO and when? Is Germany meeting its welcome promise to pay its fair share for our common defence? With the horrendous consumption of weapons and munitions, are we ensuring their replacement to safeguard our own defence and security?

Exactly 40 years ago, I listened to Ronald Reagan here in the Royal Gallery. He, Margaret Thatcher and NATO understood that in every generation like-minded nations must be ready to make extraordinary sacrifices to defeat those who threaten them. The heroism which we have seen in Ukraine has given us a clear view of the barbarians once more at our gate. Putin’s war gives sharper definition to the threat posed to our way of life by a growing number of authoritarians, their regimes and ideologies—a threat that must once again be defeated.