Ukraine: UK Policy
Lord Skidelsky Excerpts(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Lord Skidelsky
To ask His Majesty’s Government what is their policy with regard to the Ukraine war following the new policy of the government of the United States of America.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Moraes) (Lab)
My Lords, before we start the QSD, I remind all noble Lords participating of the now four-minute time limit for contributions, other than for the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, and the Minister. I ask all colleagues to stick to this time and begin winding their remarks before approaching the four-minute mark to protect time for other contributions and the Minister’s response. If we do run to time, speakers in the gap can have up to two minutes.
Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, last Thursday, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, asked the House to take note of the UK’s international position. My purpose today is narrower but more urgent; to ask the Government what their Ukraine policy now is. It is urgent because the Trump Administration have torn up the familiar script. I wish the Government had offered a full-length debate to consider the consequences of this.
I remind your Lordships of the script. The King’s Speech of 17 July promised full support to Ukraine and a clear path to NATO membership. That was of course before the American election. It echoed what David Lammy, Labour’s prospective Foreign Secretary, had written in May, which was that
“the British government must leave the Kremlin with no doubt that it will support Kyiv for as long as it takes to achieve victory”.
This, in turn, echoed the previous Government’s Grant Shapps: “We need consistently and reliably to do whatever Ukraine needs to win the war”. I have heard this repeated word for word all round your Lordships’ House in every Ukraine policy debate over the last four years.
Concerning Ukraine’s clear path to NATO membership, Peter Hegseth, US Defense Secretary, has just said that “NATO membership is not a realistic outcome of a negotiated peace”. So that is one plank of the King’s Speech gone.
What about full support for Ukraine’s war aims? Our leaders may have thought it necessary to pledge this to keep up Ukrainian morale, but there is not— and never was going to be—a Ukrainian victory, for the simple reason that the United States and NATO were never going to risk a war with Russia to achieve it. President Zelensky has now recognised this and accepted a ceasefire, and with it the reality of a compromised peace. In upending these pledges, the Trump Administration have upended our own reckless, dangerous and insincere quasi-commitments.
Words have real effects. Words such as “unprovoked”, “full-scale”, “barbaric” and “criminal” to describe Russian actions, which have tripped effortlessly off ministerial tongues, closed the door to diplomacy. You do not talk to people you label criminals and pariahs. It is an important step forward that no member of the Trump Administration has used this language since the President has been in office.
As far as I know, there has been—and the Minister might confirm this—no direct contact with the Russian Government since the war started. The Russian embassy in London has been treated as an unwelcome outpost of an enemy state. So much for the role of diplomacy in the last four years.
The UK needs to provide some thought leadership on how to end this tragic conflict. To his credit, our Prime Minister has made a start. At the London meeting of 2 March, Sir Keir Starmer proposed a four-point peace plan. The first point was to keep up military aid to Ukraine and economic pressure on Russia. I agree with this, but we should not be tempted to provide the kind of military help urged by some of our warmongers, which will only lead to a dangerous escalation.
We should also understand the limits of economic sanctions. Trump has threatened bad financial things if Russia rejects a ceasefire, but Russia is already the most sanctioned nation in the world. The purpose of sanctions, as often stated, was to degrade Russia’s ability to wage war. However, Russia has opened up alternative import routes for essential supplies and markets for its oil, energy and natural gas exports. The sanctions regime is, and will remain, much too full of holes to prevent Russia finishing its business with Ukraine. Nevertheless, the promise of its withdrawal does remain a powerful potential inducement to bring Russia to the negotiating table.
I agree with the second point that any lasting peace must guarantee Ukraine’s security, but Sir Keir said nothing about Russia’s security. He reflected the standard Whitehall view that NATO was never a real threat to Russia. This script, too, must be scrapped. Any durable peace must take into account the security concerns of both Ukraine and Russia.
I agree with the third point, that we must increase our military spending, but I mistrust the reason most often given, which is to meet the Russian threat. That is just a replay of Cold War rhetoric. European defence spending needs to go up, not because Russia threatens Europe but because Europe and Britain need to shoulder a larger share of NATO’s costs. We cannot go on expecting America to pay for our protection for ever.
Sir Keir Starmer’s fourth point is that the UK, with countries such as France, should place troops on the ground and aircraft in the air to enforce the ceasefire. This has always been a non-starter, despite the mindless repetition of the cliché “coalition of the willing”. The Trump Administration will not agree to provide the necessary backstop, and Russia, as could have been expected, has rejected the idea of NATO forces being stationed in Ukraine under a different name. Why make a proposal which is bound to be rejected unless the intention is to prolong hostilities? I concur therefore with Anatol Lieven when he says:
“Any peacekeeping force must come from genuinely neutral countries under the authority of the United Nations”.
Standing in the way of more realistic UK appraisals is the continuing misinterpretation of the motives of Putin and Trump. Time and again, I have heard noble Lords echo the Government’s line that, unless Putin is seen to fail in Ukraine, he will be “emboldened” to broaden his assault on Europe, starting with Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states—and where will it end? I believe this profoundly misinterprets both his intentions and Russia’s capabilities.
Of course one can argue endlessly about what Putin’s intentions are, but I concur with many specialists who believe that, above all, he wants Russia to be surrounded by neutral states, not by NATO missiles. A slight knowledge of history will explain why this might be so. However, I agree with Professor Jeffrey Sachs that we should not provoke the bear by inflaming ethnic nationalism in Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania, as we did in Ukraine. A durable peace with a prickly nuclear power requires great prudence. As for Russia’s expansionary capacity, I will just cite Owen Matthews in the Spectator:
“the supposedly mighty Russian army has been fought to a standstill not by Nato … but by Ukraine’s once-tiny military”.
We must also scrap our Trump-phobic narrative. This views him as an amoral deal maker with no principles, cozying up to dictators. In fact, President Trump has consistently and persistently said “Stop the killing” —an eminently moral standpoint sometimes ignored by our own humanitarians. He has replaced a passive war policy with an active search for peace. If he does succeed in ending the war, he will richly deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Government have been talking about a peace process based on sticks, but in diplomacy you need both sticks and carrots. Where are the carrots? What positive incentives are we offering Russia to make peace? I would like the Minister, in winding up, to endorse the blessed phrase “compromise peace”. Only if he does so can we be sure that the script has changed.
Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)
Lord Skidelsky Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, I will not speak directly to the proposals of the report to improve our military capabilities but will consider the framework in which they are set.
The report’s underlying assumption is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made Europe a much more dangerous place, against which we have to rearm ourselves if we are not to suffer the fate of Ukraine somewhere down the line. The report was published before Trump’s victory in the US election and therefore before the possible defection of the United States, which has been the subject of a great deal of comment this afternoon but I do not think touches the main point that the report wants to make. I reject the report’s line of argument. I am the first person to do so in this debate and have done so fairly consistently over the past two or three years. Therefore, I reject the conclusions which follow from it. I will try to explain why.
In 1989, an American political scientist called Francis Fukuyama published an iconic article in the journal The National Interest called “The End of History?”, and the subsequent two decades have sometimes been called “the Fukuyama moment”. Basically, he argued that the fall of the Soviet Union had brought about the end of history, because the causes of war between the great powers had been removed. There was a lot of initial confirmation of that, such as Gorbachev’s dream of joining the common European home. Out of that optimism came the idea of an exciting peace dividend. Of course, there would be mopping-up operations, especially in those parts of the world lagging in their appreciation of western values, but these would be nothing like the mass industrial warfare that we had experienced in the two world wars and which threatened throughout the Cold War.
The Fukuyama view of history was largely myopic. It presupposed that the world would rapidly become democratic and that science and technology would simply promote international economic co-operation. Neither of these expectations was realised. But out of the disappointed hopes of those two decades it was easy to construct a completely opposite future marked by the clash of civilisations, between the autocratic and the democratic powers, and fierce competition between the major nations of the world for control of artificial intelligence technology.
In a way, far from wanting to join Europe, Russia was depicted as wanting to attack it and even to conquer it if given the chance. In this perspective, the rhetoric of the Cold War was simply repurposed to the perceived dangers of the new situation. That has remained the conventional view; John Healey, the Defence Secretary, has said that Russia is very dangerous and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has said in this debate that we face a dramatically increased security risk.
It is interesting that all the witnesses who gave oral evidence to the committee came from the defence sector. Therefore, it is not surprising that the report strongly advocated a new or beefed-up defence industrial society and economy. What is wrong with all that? There is confusion running through the report between the nature of modern warfare, of which Ukraine is an example, and the nature of Russia’s intentions to Europe, as revealed by its invasion of Ukraine. Dr Peter Roberts of Exeter University rightly warned the committee of our inability to understand intent, which is a major flaw in our thinking, and that is true of the report. Yes, the Ukrainian war reveals the threatening nature of modern warfare, but not the kind of threats we face from Russia in Europe.
The accepted view is that this invasion reveals the expansionist nature of the Putin regime. There are, however, many knowledgeable and respected analysts in Europe, the United States and the global South who deny that premise and argue with Jack Matlock, a former US ambassador to Russia, that Putin was provoked into invading Ukraine because NATO was trying to draw Ukraine into a hostile alliance and, had it not been so engaged, there would not have been an invasion.
Let me sum up. I am not against the rearmament of Europe. We live in a dangerous world, of course, but military spending is not an end in itself; it is a means to security. There is no special virtue in spending X rather than Y per cent of GDP on defence. The threats to security have to be perceived and analysed accurately—far more accurately than this report does to justify the volume and nature of the proposals that it is making.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, your Lordships can always tell when they are getting to the end of a debate, because the noble Lords, Lord Skidelsky and Lord Balfe, will be speaking. Like the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, I disagree with much of the report, but I thank the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and his colleagues for giving it to us, because this is exactly the time to discuss how we are going to handle the new situation.
Fifty-five years ago, Ted Heath, our then Prime Minister, outlined quite clearly why we should move away from the United States and start to look at the interests of Europe when we are defending Europe. In that, he was surprisingly supported by Enoch Powell. They both fell back on the doctrine that states do not do favours for other states. They have foreign policies to maximise their impact. That was always confirmed to me when I was in the European Parliament. For some years, I was on an outfit called the Transatlantic Policy Network and, through that, got to know the late Senator John McCain quite well. He was quite clear with me that there is no special relationship. He once said, probably very accurately, “There is only a special relationship in that we rely on you to keep the sergeants’ mess in control while we look after the officers”. He was right.
To an extent, I welcome President Trump and his disruption because it is long overdue. The invasion of Ukraine was clearly illegal, but it was not unprovoked. There were years of provocation preceding it, which ended by chasing Viktor Yanukovych out of office. From then on, there was little hope that Ukraine would settle down as a NATO ally in the West because Putin, who is in charge of his country and has to do his best for it, is of the view that the borders need redrawing. I have been in Crimea and all over the Donbass region. It is Russian. Let us face that: it is not Ukrainian; it is Russian and that is why there is little objection to a Russian presence there. Your Lordships are not meant to like these facts, but they are the truth.
What we now have to do, in my view, is adjust our policies in Europe so that we can break Russia away from China. We seem to be settling back and saying, “Oh yeah, Russia and China are going to get together”. China is far more of a threat to western values, because it does not rely on a western philosophy in the way that it looks at the world and, if it is allied to Russia, that means it is on the borders of Europe—it will have bases in the Arctic before long. My view is that we need to come to terms with Trump.
One challenge for the Ministry of Defence is that we need to make sure that our nuclear deterrent will actually work. I was assured by John McCain that the Americans held the key to certain aspects of launching the missiles that made them completely under American control. Could we launch an independent missile? France can, and that is why France will be the leader of the new European security dimension.
The people we need to look to are Merz in Germany—the new chancellor—and Giorgia Meloni, who has a very good vision of how Europe should turn out, and we must hope that Macron can be succeeded by someone who has European interests at heart and is not a nationalist. I see that as being our big challenge: we have to get back into Europe as a country and get as close to the Europeans as we possibly can. We will not be able to lead the European defence initiative, for the bad reason that we decided to leave the European Union. We will not get in there, because France will claim the initiative—and, frankly, if I were France, I would claim the initiative—but we do need to get more closely aligned.
My final point is that we have had some mention of the Scandinavian version of security. That is based on a form of national service and on defending the home space. We need to indulge in that. There is no market in Britain for body bags, and there is no market in Britain for foreign adventure beyond that necessary to defend our own country and our close allies in Europe.
Ukraine
Lord Skidelsky Excerpts(5 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, I am usually put last on the speakers’ list in any debate on this topic, but I treat that as a badge of honour. I welcome the opportunity we have been given to take note. I have been taking note of the Government’s position on Ukraine for over two years now. It is unchanging: the promise, endlessly repeated, to support Ukraine “up to the hilt”—to do “whatever it takes”. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has simply repeated this with his usual eloquence.
What Ukraine thinks it takes is shown by President Zelensky’s latest victory plan: the Russian army must be driven out of Crimea and Donbass. However, who now believes that Ukraine can achieve this kind of victory at the present level of western support? Rather, there is growing agreement that without expanded western support, Ukraine, despite its courage and determination, faces defeat. This was always likely once Russia started to mobilise on a larger scale.
The demographics alone indicate this: you have a country of 36 million fighting one of 147 million. In the last four years, Ukraine’s population has shrunk by 20% while Russia’s has grown. A population the size of London has simply disappeared through war and migration; that is the reality on the ground. Of course, North Korean involvement has added a new front in this debate, but we must not delude ourselves that Russia needs North Korean troops to go on fighting. So the question arises: what more must we do to do what it takes?
There are two basic answers. The first is to tighten economic sanctions, for example by confiscating seized Russian assets. The idea that economic sanctions will cripple Putin’s war machine lingers on in the face of much evidence to the contrary. Since sanctions were imposed, Russia’s economy has boomed, Ukraine’s has slumped and the EU’s has stagnated. I hope that Treasury officials will expand on the lesson given by my noble friend Lord Desai as to why this has happened and persuade their sanctions-addicted colleagues at the Foreign Office to ease up on their enthusiasm for this approach.
I want to repeat the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, which was also referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. Have the Government taken note of the two-day BRICS summit in Kazan, where Putin hosted a meeting of 36 countries including India and China? It was also attended by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. One wants to ask: in this evolving world order, who is the pariah?
The other notion going around is that we should give Ukraine permission to use long-range missiles and navigation systems, supplied by us and other NATO countries, to strike targets deep in Russia. Do the Government support this? It is crucial, because without that support their strategy collapses. Ukraine needs something else. Are the Government prepared to provide that long-range ability to strike deep into Russian territory?
The victory at any price school relies on two exceedingly dangerous fallacies. The first is that defeating Russia in Ukraine is the key to the security of Europe. For understandable reasons, Ukraine presents itself as Europe’s shield against Russia, and many noble Lords have endorsed this. The argument goes: “If you do not defeat the Russians in Ukraine, they will keep on coming at you. Who next—the Baltics, Georgia, Poland or Moldova? Where will a maniac like Putin stop?” I call this the Munich reflex. It affects the thinking of all British elites because Britain, by its surrender to Hitler at Munich, unleashed him on the rest of Europe. They feel guilty about it and say: “We must not repeat that mistake”. But this is contextually blind. As Owen Matthews pertinently pointed out,
“the supposedly mighty Russian army has been fought to a standstill not by Nato—which, as Zelensky joked … ‘hasn’t turned up yet’—but by Ukraine’s once-tiny military”.
The second conceptual flaw is the discounting of Russian retaliation. That is very dangerous. Putin has already said that Russia would be prepared to use nuclear weapons in response to any massive air and space attack over Russia’s border by a non-nuclear power. Is it the Government’s view that he is bluffing?
Is there a way to bring the fighting to an end? The most hopeful recent development in this deadly game of chicken has been a statement by President Zelensky reported in the Financial Times two days ago:
“Russia putting an end to aerial attacks on Ukrainian energy targets and cargo ships could pave the way for negotiations to end the war”.
At last, there is a breakthrough to realism. Will the Government seize this opportunity to start some serious diplomacy? I mourn those who have died. What now moves me above all else is the thought of the thousands more young men, women and children yet to die if this war is not quickly brought to an end. I beg the Government to play their part in bringing the killing and destruction to a close.
King’s Speech
Lord Skidelsky Excerpts(8 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, I welcome the new Front Bench. I know the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, as an eloquent speaker and a doughty defender of the good fight—if he is allowed to.
I believe the Starmer era will be defined by its handling of foreign affairs. As many noble Lords have pointed out, the world is very dangerous place. There are three powder kegs: in the Far East, in the Middle East and in Ukraine. Each is capable of igniting a world war. I concentrate on Ukraine because it is on the outcome of this conflict that our Government can hope to have their biggest influence.
The gracious Speech says—the noble Lord, Lord Moore, also quoted this—that:
“My Government will continue to give its full support to Ukraine and its people and it will endeavour to play a leading role in providing Ukraine with a clear path to NATO membership”.
The new Foreign Secretary spelt it out in even more detail, saying that
“the British government must leave the Kremlin with no doubt that it will support Kyiv for as long as it takes to achieve victory. Once Ukraine has prevailed, the United Kingdom should play a leading role in securing Ukraine’s place in NATO”.
The two propositions in David Lammy’s article are of course linked: victory as defined by Kyiv and NATO means the expulsion of the Russians from Crimea and the Donbass region. Without such a victory, there can be no clear path to NATO membership.
My first question to the Government is this: do they support President Zelensky’s request to use western-supplied missiles against targets deep in Russia? Most noble Lords who have spoken on this believe that the Government should give the necessary permission but, to my mind, giving Ukraine permission to use our missiles for offensive operations deep in Russia comes perilously close to turning a proxy war into an actual war by NATO against the most heavily armed nuclear power in the world. Can we be assured that the Government will weigh properly the risk of such a deadly escalation before giving Ukraine any such permission, and bring those risks to the attention of their NATO allies, some of which are disturbingly trigger happy?
Those such as the noble Lords, Lord Hague and Lord Dannatt, who advocate arming Ukraine to carry the war to Russia, seem unconcerned with the danger of escalation. They never properly face up to the question of what the net gain to Ukraine would be of extending the war in this way. Perhaps the Minister will repair this omission.
I am concerned by the statement of General Sir Roland Walker, Chief of the General Staff, that Britain has three years to prepare for war against the “axis of upheaval”: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. It is surely not the job of serving officers of the Crown to define British foreign policy, so I urge the Government to tell the general not to be so free with his public words.
My final concern is with economic sanctions. The Bell, which is by far the most reliable source of information on Russia, has tirelessly pointed out that instead of weakening the Russian economy, sanctions against individual Russians have brought about the repatriation of Russian capital into Russia to boost Putin’s war chest. Why do the Government believe that such sanctions will help bring about a Ukrainian victory?
I start from a different position: I do not believe that either side can defeat the other, short of a dangerous escalation. That is why I favour a negotiated peace as soon as possible. This means two things: recognising that Ukraine has already won its most important victory for independence, and recognising that postponement of negotiations will make Ukraine’s position worse and not better. We may supply Ukraine with more and deadlier weapons, but Russia will continue to turn itself into a totally militarised economy, capable of even more deadly retaliation.
I finish up where I started: what is the Government’s road map to peace in Ukraine? I hope the Minister will tell me where I have gone wrong in my argument. If the Government cannot fault it, I beg them to rethink their policy, because we are talking about the life and death of thousands and perhaps millions.