Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 31st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I will start with the one uncontroversial thing I am going say, which is to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Barrow. I look forward to his contribution, particularly in view of his past career.

I am speaker number 28. With the exception of my good and noble friend Lord Skidelsky, I do not imagine that anyone apart from me is going to upset the consensus. The fact of the matter is that, first, the British public are not united behind what we are trying to do. They do not actually understand what we are trying to do. They do not know what we are trying to do. They do not know how much money we have sent to Ukraine, and how much we have subsidised Ukraine.

I have visited the Ukraine on 11 occasions, so I am not someone who has just been a holiday-maker or looked from afar. I spent a lot of that time actually in the east, in the Donbass, where it was quite clear to me that the great majority of the Russian-speaking population were in no way friends of Kyiv. Most of them wished it to go away, and the more laws that were passed in the capital that did things such as restricting the Russian language and placing other burdens on Russian- speaking families, the further they divorced themselves from the support in the east. I remember going to one polling station in an election I looked at. We got to the count, and the box was emptied. There were about 3,000 votes in it, and just three were not for the party of the regions, which was the local party. The returning officer said, “Oh well, three people who can’t read”, disallowed the votes and allowed the votes for the opposition.

The fact is that we made a complete mess. We supported the American drive, which was basically to break up Ukraine. Let us be in no doubt about it. President Yanukovych, who was elected largely with the votes of the east, was destabilised to a point where, when he left Ukraine, the east basically left Ukraine as well. They thought, “Our part of this democracy is gone”.

Of course, it was a very odd democracy. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, is on the Front Bench for the Liberal Democrats. She will know that her former colleague in the European Parliament, Pat Cox, was the special envoy to Ukraine. He did a huge amount of work, but he could not get the two sides together. They just did not want to talk. They preferred to drift towards where they are now.

Where are we going to? We are going to a rubble-strewn country that will make Germany look like a garden city. We are looking at a country that is going to be ruined for years, and where, when the war is over, we will find that the Americans, as ever, are missing. Just look at Afghanistan or one or two other places if you want some of that. It has got to be rebuilt. Frankly— I never thought I would say this—President Trump is probably the best hope we have. He is the only person who is willing to concede that there could be a ceasefire without there being reparations or blame on one side or the other.

The other point is that China is certainly not going to follow our rules. If you look back to my interview in 1965 when I joined the Foreign Office, I was asked by some ageing diplomat—they always put a diplomat on the selection panel—“Where do you think we’ll be in 100 years’ time, Balfe?” I said, “China will be the worst enemy because we do not understand Confucianism”. We still do not. We still group the two together. They are very different. China will outwit us long before we have beaten any Russians.

My final point is, please, let us try to get this war stopped. People will lose; people will not get all they want; but they never will. Our aim as a country should be to join President Trump in getting the war stopped.

I told you no one would like it.