Russia

Lord Truscott Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Truscott (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, on securing this debate. It is focused on international law and democratic principles, and of course your Lordships’ House is united in wanting to see both those fundamental principles upheld in Russia and elsewhere. However, as the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Moynihan, referred to, it is not clear what the West’s current strategy is and how it is designed to work. I welcome the Minister to her new role and post but should be grateful if, in her summing up, she could explain.

The plan seems to be that sanctions will force President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin into a volte-face, so that they relinquish Crimea and withdraw support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. Yet the sanctions and Western policy are having the opposite effect. The Russian people, the cowed oligarchs and the Kremlin are united as never before behind President Vladimir Putin. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, mentioned President Putin’s popularity. His opinion poll ratings stand at 86%. He has never been more popular domestically and he is almost guaranteed re-election in 2018. Crimea is Russia’s only access to the Mediterranean, with the Black Sea fleet’s headquarters at Sevastopol, for which Russia fought several wars and lost many thousands of lives over the centuries. Russia is determined never to give up Crimea again, and President Putin knows he will go down in history as the first Russian leader since Catherine the Great to reunite the Crimea with Mother Russia.

One Russian businessman confided in me that the result of sanctions is to make Russia more authoritarian, illiberal and anti-western in outlook. The gains in trade, liberalisation and democracy of the past 23 years since the break-up of the USSR will be lost forever and will lead to a lost generation. Many young Russians have travelled extensively and have even been educated abroad. We are cutting them adrift.

Having studied and followed Russia for the last 36 years, I must admit that I am slightly puzzled by the West’s reaction to the Ukrainian conflict. Even during the Soviet Union and after the invasion of Afghanistan, trade and other links were maintained with the Soviet Union, even despite the boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The era we are embarking on will thus be worse than the Cold War: we will have geopolitical and economic instability together. In picking a fight with Russia over Ukraine I fear we are fighting the wrong war against the wrong enemy at the wrong time. A diplomatic solution to the current crisis was on the table from the beginning and accepted in principle by Moscow and Kiev: greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine’s regions; linguistic rights for ethnic Russian speakers; and maintaining Ukraine’s military neutrality.

Realistically speaking, eastern Ukraine is a political and economic burden Russia would rather do without, and no Russian I know would seriously contemplate invading the EU or a NATO member state, thus starting a third world war. Russians may be many things, but they are not stupid. Even ethnic Russian speakers in the Baltic states believe they are better off in the European Union. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, it is true that economic sanctions are hitting Russia very hard indeed, but they will also hit us in Europe too, especially since EU-Russian trade is 14 times greater than US-Russian trade. The German economy is already slowing, dragging the eurozone into recession, partly as a result of falling exports to Russia and weakening business confidence as a result.

Is this the time to pick a trade war with Russia, with global economic recovery on a knife edge? Would it not be better to solve the Ukrainian conflict diplomatically and focus on the many areas of mutual interest where Russia and the West need each other, as several noble Lords have referred to, such as trade, energy, space, the real existential fight against Islamist fundamentalism, and international co-operation on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea? It may not be a perfect solution, but it is better than the alternative in an imperfect world.