Ukraine

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I was in Moscow in 1968 when the Soviet army put down Dubček, and I feel the same cold horror today that I felt then. However, this is much worse than 1968. In 1991, over 90% of the population of Ukraine voted for independence, with large majorities even in all those regions where there is a strong ethnic Russian population. Our locus to object is far stronger now than it was in 1968. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, mentioned the Budapest memorandum; it carries the signatures of John Major and Douglas Hurd. In it, the Russians promised that they would respect the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine within its existing borders.

The question is: could we have done more to avert this disaster? I doubt it. Looking at the paranoia and posturing in the Kremlin, I do not think there is much more we could have done. However, there are lessons to be learned of continuing validity as the crisis continues.

First, on sanctions, the best ones are those that deter. However, in order to achieve deterrence, you have to be ahead of the game and you have to go for scale and specificity. The first UK sanctions package totally failed the test of scale, and we are still failing the test of specificity. I do not believe that the Kremlin has paused for a second to consider what we have said about sanctions.

Secondly, we are talking only about sanctioning Russian exports. It is a very difficult thing to do, given that there is a world market in hydrocarbons. What is much easier to do and would have much more impact on the Russians is to sanction their strategic imports. Russia is even more an oil and gas economy now than it was when Putin came in, despite all his welcome early talk of modernising the economy. It has gone backwards. Its manufacturing sector has declined, which means that it is more vulnerable today to controls on the exports of sensitive technology to it than it was then. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was quite right when he spoke of reinventing CoCom—global controls on strategic exports. We seem to be going back to the Cold War—okay, we needed that instrument in the Cold War and we need it again now.

I have very little more to offer. I support everything said by the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, in a masterly maiden speech. I should like particularly to add my voice to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. Here I slightly part company with the noble Lord, Lord McDonald.

The detaching of Luhansk and Donetsk from Ukraine wins no plaudits in Beijing. Beijing has never recognised Abkhazia and Ossetia. Beijing is rather against the idea of breakaway provinces. Installing a puppet government in Kyiv will alarm not just the Baltic states, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia but an awful lot of Azeris, Kazakhs, Tajiks and Turkmen. This is not a crisis of Putin versus the West; this is not a crisis of Putin versus NATO; this is a crisis of Putin versus the world. We need now to be talking to all those in the former Soviet empire who are uneasy about the idea of the attempted recreation of the Soviet empire and all those in the developing world who are uneasy about what they see as the invasion of an independent state that voted by an overwhelming majority for independence. They are inclined to hope that maybe the world can do something about it. We need to be talking to all our Commonwealth friends and we need to be talking globally. This is not just Putin versus the West; this is Putin versus the world.