Ukraine

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Friday 26th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register. I also commend the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, following her in her envoy responsibilities to Ukraine.

I want first to thank the Government for providing time for this debate on Ukraine. We need constantly to discuss the illegal, unprovoked attack on Ukraine, because the fight of the Ukrainian people is our fight as well. Secondly, I congratulate the Prime Minister on his visit last week to Kyiv and commend the important package of military help and the new security guarantees that he gave when he was there. It is good that this new money has been announced, since the 2023 money will run out in only a few weeks’ time. However, if there is to be a strong signal to the Kremlin of our long-term support, I urge the Government to give a multiyear commitment and not simply a one-year package. That will inevitably involve sacrifices by our taxpayers, but, remarkably, it is an investment in our own nation’s safety.

The basic rule of politics is that it is not what you say; it is what people hear. That one man in the Kremlin needs to hear—has to hear—that we are with Ukraine until it prevails. Sir Basil Liddell Hart, one of great strategists of the Second World War, wisely said that the outcome of the battle will more likely be determined in the minds of the commanders than in the bodies of their men. It is into the mind of Vladimir Putin that we need to get the message that he cannot win. Frankly, we in the West—in the White House and in European capitals—have become preoccupied, and therefore limited, by fears of “escalation”. It is time now that, instead, we inculcate in the minds of Putin, his high military command and that elite who acquiesce with this fatal adventure the idea that they in Russia might overstep the mark and escalate beyond their own limits and hence endanger the “motherland” itself.

It is only now, with the Ukrainians having developed their own means of striking inside Russia without our weaponry, that Russians will at last begin to see the price that they are paying for Putin’s folly. I repeat that we need to get the message into the mind of that one man who made the decision to invade—the same man who can order the withdrawal—that his strategic mission has been a failure.

We sink far too easily and far too often into the lazy, dangerous narrative that, since last year’s overoptimistic autumn offensive stalled against the minefields and trenches of the Russian conscripts, somehow Ukraine cannot succeed. That is plainly wrong. In reality, Putin’s clear original objective of limiting NATO enlargement and European Union encroachment, of dividing Europe and breaking the transatlantic bonds, has been a miserable failure—not to mention his demented ambition of taking and subordinating Ukraine in three days.

Now, with no real Russian progress in taking territory beyond the minefields, and indeed losing half of what they originally took 700 days ago, and by failing even to occupy the land they had pretended and legislated to annex, it would appear that Putin can only wait it out until Donald Trump gets elected, who, he hopes, will do some grubby deal to end the war. Even that strategy, if that is what it can be called, is incorrect. Republican members of the United States Congress who were here last week with the Marshall fund were keen to articulate that such a strategy is flawed. When he was in office, and in spite of his rhetoric, President Trump sent missiles to Poland, increased funding to NATO and robustly increased the power of his own military. Therefore, it begins to look like yet another Kremlin miscalculation.

In my personal view—and I dealt with Putin in better times—there is a weakness inside the secretive enclave in the walls of the Moscow Kremlin. From the outside, we, and indeed the Russian people, cannot know how fragile is the morale in the circle around Putin. However, from the Prigozhin incident—here was a man invented by, organised by and used by Putin brutally exposing the truth of this disaster—we got a glimpse of the unseen tensions in the ruling elite. What we saw in Prigozhin’s march on Moscow was the revelation of a serious weakness, a chink in the armour of a gambling authoritarian.

By continuing to build our supplies to Kyiv, by maintaining western unity and by giving the strongest possible message of our continuing resolve, the man in the Kremlin may yet see that there is a way out for him from this Russian-made, Putin-made disaster.