Ukraine: Defence Relationships

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for introducing this debate, but it seems that for a while we were fighting not just the Ukraine-Russia war but the EU war as well, between Brexit and no-Brexit. Let us suspend that war for the time being and concentrate on the Ukraine-Russia war. What we do about Brexit is another issue. I speak as a remainer.

The most important thing is to understand and decide that the only solution to this war is that Ukraine regains its entire old frontiers and is re-established as a country safe from external aggression. If this is to be realised, we cannot go down the road that France and Germany, for example, have been proposing, of a peace in which Ukraine would lose its eastern Russian-speaking zones and be left with only western Ukraine. One principle that we established when we established the United Nations in 1945 was that national borders are sacrosanct and cannot be arbitrarily violated by one power set against another.

The problem will last much longer than people think. This is not going to be a 100-day war but probably a 1,000-day war, if not longer. Europe has a habit of going to war quite frequently. We went to war in 1914 until 1918, and then, within another 21 years, in 1939 we went to war again until 1945. We then thought that we had peace but again, we are back at war in Europe in 2022. This is because there are certain unresolved national issues in Europe. Russia has always felt that Ukraine somehow should be part of Russia and not an independent country. I had a colleague at the LSE who taught Russian history. When asked what his biggest dream was, he said, “An independent Ukraine.” At that time Ukraine was not independent. It then became independent temporarily and now it is threatened with control by Russia.

One thing we must make clear to the Russians and the Ukrainians in this battle is that we will stand by Ukraine until it regains its frontiers. Like many other noble Lords, I am in touch with some Ukrainian groups, who send me emails about what their idea of liberation is. We must make that the first priority. Neither our energy supplies nor our wheat supplies nor the debt position of third-world countries should gain priority over the world getting together to give Ukraine its borders back and some future guarantee of safety from another external attack by Russia. Some noble Lords have talked about a new world order, and one very important thing to recognise is that the United Nations has failed in this respect. The United Nations Security Council was built up as an oligarchy of big powers—the permanent members—and we saw the farce whereby Russia could not be indicted for its attack because China used its veto to protect Russia.

The UN will have to be repaired at some future date because right now it is not an effective body. We are left with the EU and the US. The western alliance is divided about how to deal with the Ukraine crisis. Some western European countries would like a quick, patch-up treaty, which will leave Ukraine divided in two and then Russia will go away. I think that is a mistake. We ought to insist that the UK will aid Ukraine for as long as possible, and that our aim is to guarantee that we will stand by Ukraine until the end, just as we stood in the Second World War.