Ukraine

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Friday 31st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Barrow, to this House. He clearly brings with him a great degree of expertise, and I am looking forward to his maiden speech later. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in his excellent opening remarks, said that Ukraine’s security was basically our security. This is a message that was repeated constantly when I was on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly—I got thrown off shortly after the election because of the appalling results for the Conservatives. All the time, it was recognised at that stage that we could not allow Putin to win in Ukraine. Basically, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has referred to, Putin will claim victory from whatever settlement comes out of this.

The extraordinary thing is that we have always had the capacity in the West to defeat Putin in Ukraine, but the trouble is that we have never used the capability that we have. We all know well that wars are won by the grim determination of the troops on the ground—the Ukrainians certainly do not lack that—combined with technology. Technology is absolutely critical. Where we in the West have a lead over all other countries in the world is in the air, particularly with the F35. Bear in mind that the F35 is the only fifth-generation jet in the world and has a capacity to jam all attacks on it. It flies in at 65,000 feet and can protect 11 other aircraft with inferior defences, so it is an absolutely lethal weapon, but we failed to use it. Why did we fail to use it? There was a man under the Biden Administration called Jake Sullivan, and I think he was responsible for the narrative that went, “Well, we don’t really want to remove Putin as a dictator in Russia because we don’t know what will replace him. We suspect that the whole of Russia will break up into fiefdoms with nuclear weapons and they’ll be much more difficult to negotiate with”.

That, of course, was also laced with the whole concept that Putin was keen to deploy, which was that this could all develop into the third world war with an exchange of nuclear weapons. President Putin, an ex-KGB man, knows about nuclear deterrence, even if other people seem to have forgotten about it, and he probably also knows that his nuclear deterrent is infinitely inferior to anything in the West. I do not think he wants to be remembered for saying goodbye to Moscow. I think that much of this is exaggerated, and the Ukrainians have every right to feel that they have been shedding a lot of blood on our behalf. We could have done much to change that.

I turn to the whole question of sanctions. If President Trump has decided that he is not prepared to deliver Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, this reduces the capability of Ukraine to degrade the Russian economy by taking out its oil refineries and so forth and making it more difficult for it to export oil. In those circumstances, we lean very much on the sanctions that are being imposed on Rosneft and Lukoil. What I do not quite understand is why we do not sanction all Russian oil. Presumably you could have a situation where some rusting oil tanker is stopped at sea; the captain is asked “What are you doing?” and he produces a sheaf of papers and says, “I’m not carrying oil for Lukoil or Rosneft— I’m carrying it for some other company that was created yesterday”. How do we then say, on that basis, that we will stop that oil being delivered? Perhaps when the Minister comes to sum up, she can spell out to us how this will all work.

Other than that, the coalition of the willing, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has pointed out, will have a very difficult task. We have to ensure that air power plays a major role in that. I would like to see aircraft based in Ukraine, doing their training in Ukraine in a NATO base, not a Ukrainian one. We should then be determined to make sure that peace is maintained, which I am sure will come eventually.