Armed Forces: Resilience

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hintze, in his maiden speech. I applaud and agree with his final sentiment that complacency is not an option. I know him well and recognise his remarkable and successful business career, his pride in his Australian background, especially so on this Australia Day, and his remarkable record for philanthropy, not only to the Armed Forces but to institutions such as the Natural History Museum. He has a lot of experience and wisdom, and we therefore look forward to hearing more from him in future.

I will speak about Ukraine, about which we really should have a full debate in this Parliament, both in this House and in the other House. It is increasingly clear that Vladimir Putin has declared war on the West. It is also clear that we are not responding adequately to that overt challenge to our countries and what we stand for. There is no visible urgency in our national behaviour. It is, of course, a war unlike the wars of the past. However, that old-fashioned type of brutal war is being waged against the territory and the people of the sovereign state of Ukraine. In contrast, Putin’s war on the West is much more subtle, more hybrid, less visible and more multifaceted, but just as potent and damaging. By using misinformation, election interference, cyberattacks, corruption, organised crime and malicious diplomacy, and by exploiting every crack in our democratic societies, he is seeking to disrupt and to weaken the fabric of our liberal, open democracies.

At the same time, that has nothing to do with promoting an alternative economic or social model, as the Soviet Union sought to do with its brand of Marxism-Leninism. Putin may well harbour, in secret, demented dreams about recreating that oppressive empire, but, in reality, he is violently posturing to gain attention and hoping to establish some parity with the United States of America. With his economy tanking and his young, economically active population draining away, those are simply foolish delusions.

The issue for us today as we approach the 365th day of Putin’s three-day war against Ukraine is: what should we be doing in response to the declaration of war by the Russian President? Here is my checklist of what we need to do. First, we need to secure our own societies and democratic systems. With London still a reservoir of Russian dark money, as we heard earlier, and London’s lawyers still doing the dirty work for Russian money men and women, more needs to be done to enforce and toughen sanctions against those who do the Kremlin’s bidding or who profit from his regime.

Secondly, our defences need strengthening, as has already been said and will be said again in this debate—and I am sure in the other maiden speech, from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Peach, who I know and respect very well as a friend. That does not just mean spending more on defence; it means replenishing the stocks we are giving to the Ukrainians. Thirdly, we need to give the Ukrainians more. If, as Ministers continually say, the Ukrainians are fighting for themselves, their country, and for us, as indeed they are, by holding stocks and equipment here, when our front line is actually in eastern Ukraine, we leave ourselves dangerously exposed.

The fourth thing we need to do is to tell the Russian people that we, NATO, the European Union and the West are not attacking Russia. Instead, we are helping the sovereign state of Ukraine to defend itself against an unprovoked attack. How do we get that message across? The answer is that we did it in the Cold War and can do it again. More Russian language information needs to get into Russia, and we need to promote the independent BBC World Service, as well as YouTube, Instagram and a host of means that can get past the wall of deceit and lies which characterise Russia’s propaganda outlets. A younger generation can access the web, but the older folk—that is, the majority—in Russia depend on the official media, with its Orwellian approach to truth and facts.

Fifthly, we need to tell the Russian military, whose advice Putin clearly ignored when he ordered the invasion, some bold truths. The Russian high command knows that it was ill-prepared for such an ambitious war, and that it had, through faulty and over-optimistic intelligence, completely underestimated the opposition, resilience and ingenuity of the Ukrainians. The Russian military know that they are struggling against a formidable, highly motivated Ukrainian population, now being armed with western-supplied, sophisticated weaponry that they have no answer to. In their collective memory must be the parallel with the Red Army in Afghanistan in February 1989. They were faced with an endless, unwinnable war costing lives and precious resources, so the Kremlin ordered the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union to come home. Nobody was asking at that time for an off-ramp or a ceasefire, or some face saver for the Russians. They simply folded their tents and left—and 32 months later there was no Soviet Union.

Sixthly, we need to tell Putin and the small number of cronies around him advising him and telling him all the time what he wants to hear, that all his strategic objectives have failed. He wanted to stop NATO enlargement, he wanted to split Europe, and he wanted to split Europe from the United States of America—all failed. He wanted to crush and eliminate Ukraine from the map, and instead he has produced a new, deep, permanent feeling of nationhood in that country. He wanted to annex and absorb the Donbas and the land corridor to Crimea, but now his spokesman cannot even describe what has been annexed and what they still hold.

We need to tell Vladimir Putin this: one step over the Article 5 NATO line and there will be an existential risk to the Russian motherland. Here is another message for the man in the Kremlin, who gave us this terrible war. Speaking, as I do, as the only person ever to announce the invoking of Article 5—that guarantee that an attack on one NATO country should be seen as an attack on them all—I can tell Vladimir Putin this. I met him nine times during my time in NATO, and at that point we did good business together, but I tell him now that the Article 5 guarantee of a nuclear weapons alliance goes well beyond normal red lines.

Finally, we need to address the global south and the lack of understanding of Ukraine’s position in Africa, South America and India. It seems that many countries in the south see this is as a regional conflict of payback for NATO enlargement or a challenge to the over-mighty US and the arrogance of the West. However, they must understand that, if it becomes accepted that borders can be changed by force and that sovereign states can be invaded and annexed, if nuclear blackmail intimidates neighbouring states, many more countries than Ukraine will be on the danger list. We need urgently to get that message over and to make an effort to get it heard loudly.

I end with a sentiment worth the House pondering on if anybody is worried about further escalation. The greatest nuclear threat we face today is a Russian victory. We must do everything possible to prevent that happening.