Russia

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I will use my four minutes to make a few points. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, for initiating the debate. I hope he will find that my response fits into his demand for robustness.

My basic thesis is that Russia is a European country with whom we need a good relationship. I quote in support of that the Russian ambassador himself, who, in response to the report of the House of Commons last year wrote as part of his letter to Crispin Blunt:

“I’d like to state without any reservation that Russia is and will remain a part and parcel of Europe and European civilization”.

That was Alexander Yakovenko writing to Crispin Blunt last year.

We can have sanctions for as long as we like, but they do not appear to be working and I am not sure that we are clear about why we have them. It seems to me that we always need to have an enemy somewhere or other. It has been demonstrated by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, the distinguished chair of the committee I sit on, exactly how small Russia is in relation to the rest of the world. My view is that we need a new Helsinki: Russia, after all, demonstrated that it was a European power by signing Helsinki at the height of the conflict between the West and communism. That no longer exists.

Russia, as the former Bishop, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Chartres, has said, has built 30,000 churches, I think he said. Patriarch Kirill was in London last year; he went to see the Queen. He is now a respected international traveller and person but someone, I remind noble Lords, who had immense trouble in the Ukraine, with the Ukrainian Government trying to confiscate the property of the Russian Orthodox Church, something we should maybe be concerned about.

The point I want to make is that a lot of the conflicts that exist need talking about, not demonstrating against. The borders of Ukraine have been adjusted five times in the last 100 years. Russia is not going to leave Crimea. It is as simple as that. The Ukrainian Government provoked the Crimeans; they tried to abolish the Russian language at one point; they said they would not renew the base lease at another point; there was a huge amount of provocation. The least we owe the Russians is to sit down and have a conference where we can all talk about the differences that exist.

There are another couple of differences. I am probably a very sad person, but over the Christmas holidays I was reading the account of the Soviet Politburo of the 1930s. That clearly does make me very sad. The republic of Abkhazia was causing problems because it would not unite with Georgia; it said that it was a separate place. This is in 1933. South Ossetia was also causing problems. These are not new problems. Some of these people, whether we like it or not, do not regard themselves as being part of the states to which they were assigned, probably wrongly, during the Soviet era. The point I make is that, if we believe in self-determination for Gibraltar and the Falklands, we need to find some way of having self-determination for some of the other bits and bobs around the world that we seem to get very worked up about.

I finish by just pointing out that I was in the Ukraine; I was in the Ukrainian Parliament. All they would say to me—this is during the time when it was part of the Ukraine—was, “We are in the wrong country; we are Russian”. So this is nothing new and my message, all I ask the Minister to do, is to ask her policy people to read what has been said in this debate because what comes through is the need to develop a new policy in our relations between the West and Russia.