Ukraine

Lord Sedwill Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sedwill (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I thank your Lordships for permitting me to make my maiden speech in a debate of such seriousness. I hope noble Lords will understand if I do not go through the usual personal reminiscences that are customary on such an occasion and use my time to focus on the issue at hand. But let me start with one: I was a junior diplomat in training when the Berlin Wall came down, and I was on duty the weekend that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. I am haunted by those experiences right at the beginning of my career as we face a much more serious challenge today.

For the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, has set out, we must take Vladimir Putin at his word. Many thought that he hoped to consolidate Crimea, to intimidate Ukraine and to re-establish the Moscow-Washington channel as the only means of dialogue about European and wider security—but he does not. He wants to reverse the outcome of the Cold War, for the reasons that several noble Lords have set out, and we must assume and act in accordance with that.

I suggest that there are three things that we should do, beyond the measures that the Government, along with our allies, have already taken. I commend the Government for the robust stance that they have taken throughout this crisis, blending diplomacy with defence and strong action on sanctions. The key to sanctions is to impose a higher price than was expected by the offender in the first place. We did that after Salisbury; we must do so again now. Much of what we have seen so far will have been priced in by the Putin regime. For the reasons that we have heard, we should go further, not only with economic sanctions but, for example, dismantling the intelligence networks around the world on which Russia depends—which we dismantled after the Salisbury attack but many others did not. We can provide other countries with the material that they need to do that.

We should also attack the Putin regime on exactly the point that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, just made: its fear of its own people. When the regime gets bogged down in Ukraine, as is likely, it is important that we reveal the truth to Russia’s own people as well as to other countries that are in play. We should do that through all of the classic means, such as the media, the BBC World Service, Russian-speaking services and so on, but through modern means as well—cyber, social media and information campaigns of the kind that the regime uses against us. One of the only heartening things that we have seen in this very sorry episode was the speedy resistance of some brave Russians to the actions of their Government; we need to encourage that as well.

We must support the Ukrainian resistance with the military and other capabilities that they need as their resistance to the Russian invasion shifts from conventional to unconventional, from military to militia. It is really important that our intelligence services and others have not only the capabilities but the legal frameworks to do so; we have struggled with that in other conflicts elsewhere.

Finally, as the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said, we must ensure that NATO itself is ready for the next phase. For too long—for the whole period of my career since the fall of the Berlin Wall—we have assumed that the “new world order”, as the first President Bush referred to it, was something on which we could rely and globalisation something we could take for granted. It is now clear that we cannot, so, as well as deploying additional forces to reassure the eastern European nations that NATO will stand by them—that Article 5 is an absolute guarantee covering not only every inch of territory but any cyberattacks or other kinds of unconventional warfare that they might face—NATO must also reaffirm its intention to modernise and deter further Russian aggression. That means every nation not only meeting but exceeding the 2% and quickly putting in place programmes to achieve a proper, integrated NATO capability that can be deployed against Russia or any other adversary, and working through some of the fractiousness that, my word, looks trivial now, between NATO, the EU and other headquarters as they try to try to address those capabilities.

My final point is this: other autocrats are clearly watching us very carefully, as we have heard already, and some of them have territorial ambitions too, but not every authoritarian state, or every state that does not share our democratic values, will be comfortable with what they have seen of Russia trying to breach the borders of another country. Therefore, our diplomacy must encompass those states as well and encourage the collective international response to a breach of not just the rules-based order but the global rule of law.