Ukraine

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, yesterday, 24 February 2022, is a date which will live in infamy. President Putin told his people that the purpose of the invasion was to de-Nazify Ukraine. The repulsive irony of his lying statement is that, from the very first pictures, the Russian assault looked just like the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, or of Russia itself two years later. Putin’s Panzers are on the warpath in a manner that would make Hitler proud.

I, like many others, bought into the myth of Putin, the cool-headed, chess-playing strategist who was never going to invade Ukraine. At the beginning of the year, Putin sent to Washington and NATO Headquarters in Brussels two draft treaties. These set out his demands: Ukraine never to join NATO and NATO to retreat to the status quo ante the collapse of the Soviet Union. These demands went beyond the acceptable, but there was something in them that we might have been able to work with. However, by invading Ukraine, he has blown diplomacy out of the window. By personally deceiving both President Macron and Chancellor Scholz, he has lost all trust. His aggression will strengthen NATO’s unity and determination to protect its eastern members. That is the very opposite of what is to be found in these draft treaties—the very opposite of his wish to reverse the security arrangements put in place after the Cold War.

Europe will now become an armed camp, in which NATO is revived by the adrenaline shot of Russian aggression. Putin, in his derangement, has thus sabotaged his own ambition. What we have to fear in Putin is not an ice-cold calculating machine but a leader become unhinged by his grievances over, as he sees it, history’s injustice and the West’s indifference to his demands. We should have seen this coming and done something to prevent it.

The question now is how far Putin’s megalomania will go. Ukraine is not the limit of his ambitions, as many noble Lords have pointed out. Even as we speak, the Balkans are boiling up again, with Serb revanchism aided and abetted by Moscow.

As it is, Ukraine is ablaze on a scale not seen in Europe since 1945. Short of nuclear war, the situation could not be more dangerous. Putin has smashed the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, driven a coach and horses through the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, brushed aside the OSCE and violated the 1994 Budapest understanding. To all of these, Moscow had put its signature.

But, as always, we in the West judge our enemies by our own standards rather than theirs. We believed, or wanted to believe, Putin’s assurances that he had no hostile intent towards Ukraine, even though he had been amassing troops, launching cyberattacks and staging provocations. Of the justifications he has publicly given for attacking Ukraine, not a single one is true. Now, too late in the day, we realise that he had been planning this all along, drip-feeding false information to his own people since 2014. The West’s naivety will be a lesson that should remain with us for the rest of the century and beyond.

As someone of Russian blood, and some Ukrainian blood as well, and as someone whose family was arrested and killed by the Bolsheviks, I can only weep for the Ukrainian and Russian people. They will be the ones who pay the price for Putin’s lies and deceptions.

Can my noble friend the Minister say whether Her Majesty’s Government will discuss with NATO allies the urgent need to increase defence budgets so that our alliance can offer serious deterrence to Russian aggression? Is she confident that the FCDO has adequate Russian and Ukrainian expertise, including language speakers, on hand?