Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 26th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming my noble friend Lord Camoys to our Benches. I am sure he will make a long and distinguished career in this House, and we will benefit much from his wisdom. I certainly agree with the last few words of the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, and that is what I want to concentrate on.

First, however, I will just make it clear that I have spent nearly my whole life in foreign policy in one way or another, from a junior position in the Foreign Office in the 1960s, through 25 years in the European Parliament, and then another 15 years doing things for its former Members’ association. Those various jobs took me to all the countries of Europe on many occasions; I was trying to work out how many times I have been to Ukraine—it is probably eight or nine times —and I have also been to Russia a number of times. Having said that, incidentally, I also led the first delegation of the European Parliament to the North Atlantic Assembly, which was quite an interesting event, to put it mildly.

I start by saying, to bowdlerise the words of LP Hartley: “Russia is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. I was in Ukraine several times between the end of the last century and about 2016. During that time, I got to know, first, ex-President Kuchma, who was the last of the old guard, and then of course we had the orange revolution and all that flowed out of it. We have to look at why Russia did what it did, because it was not something that just happened. The fact of the matter is—I saw it through years of being there—that there was massive provocation from the Government in Kyiv. I served for eight years as one of this House’s representatives in the Council of Europe. There I was on its legal affairs committee which dealt with Ukraine, believe it or not, and I was chair for a time of the committee for the enforcement of judgments of the European court.

One of the constant issues was the way in which the Government in Kyiv were trying to outlaw the Russian language. This was a regular and running sore. I remember going to Crimea, where I was surrounded by politicians from the local parliament in Simferopol telling me they did not want to be in Ukraine. We are talking about 2012 or 2014, in the middle of the last decade, not just before the invasion. I got the same message when I went to Donetsk, to Luhansk and to Mariupol. They felt that the Russian language was being outlawed, and that it was ridiculous. I recall talking to one or two families who said to me, “The only language we know at home is Russian. Do you expect us to talk to our children in Ukrainian? Our schools teach in Russian. They’ve taught in Russian throughout history”.

The other group, of course, was the Hungarians. The Hungarian schools were forbidden to teach in Hungarian, and that is one of the reasons we have the problems with Mr Viktor Orbán today. Yes, he is certainly a Putin supporter, but he is also very angry with Ukraine, and this was going on for years.

While I was on the Council of Europe, I was also for a time the vice-president of the Venice Commission, which looks at rule of law issues in Europe. On several occasions we had before the Venice Commission the Ukrainian Government’s desire to outlaw Russian in Ukraine. It was a regular feeling, and it was backed by the West; it was backed by the EU and by everybody in the western embassies in Kyiv. The Russians illegally invaded Ukraine because, basically, they lost their temper. It would not happen in a democracy because there would not be a Putin with quite the power that he had to do what he did.

I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, who mentioned talking to Russians just before the invasion and that they all said it could not happen. I had the same experience talking to Russians. I talked to the Russian ambassador in Britain after it happened. He put a brave face on it, but I swear he did not know it was going to happen until the morning that it actually happened, when he got a call from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow telling him what was going to happen. It was a very well concealed secret.

My final point is this. We have to find a way of getting ourselves out of what is effectively a frozen dispute. That is where we are. It is not going to move that far; “General Winter” is not going to be beaten. Our only answer, it appears, as our great Minister for the Armed Forces, James Heappey, said, is an army of

“half a million men and women under arms … Where do we get our second echelon from?”.

No existing policies spell out how the UK could mobilise a force big enough to take on Russia. Frankly, if that is His Majesty’s Government’s aim, I despair.