Ukraine

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, particularly in her suggestion that it is not too early to start thinking about the long term. She is quite right.

I say to my noble friend Lord Soames, who is no longer in his place, how much I admired his contribution to our discussion. I know we will have many more quality contributions of that kind from him, and it is a great pleasure to have him in our House.

A lot of wise things have already been said in this debate. We have reached the point in our discussion where much of the important ground has been covered one way or another by previous speakers. I intend to be brief.

I think there is widespread understanding that we are at something of a turning point in this war. The bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people and their leadership was exemplified by President Zelensky in his remarkable performance yesterday, crucially underpinned by the military assistance given by the allies. That has led to a level of Ukrainian success in the field that has come as a fairly nasty shock to the Russians; the situation on the ground is not one that they either wanted or expected. However, when they gear up for the next offensive, they are not likely to make precisely the same mistakes. It seems to me that they will be better organised and their attempt at combined-force operations will be much more effective. General Gerasimov, who is no fool and whose prestige is now directly engaged, and for that matter Putin, even though his position is not necessarily in danger, must be conscious of the damage done to their reputation for competence. There is not a lot more that they have to claim in that regard. All those factors mean that we shall see a different quality of military performance when fighting really resumes. Economy is not going to be the Russians’ main consideration; I think they are going to throw everything they have at it, so the challenge to the Ukrainian forces could be formidable.

HMG have given real leadership in supporting Ukraine’s military capability. I commend the Government on the absolutely consistent and strong role that they have played, frequently being the catalyst for action by allies that might not otherwise have occurred, or certainly not have occurred in sufficiently good or timely a way as has been the case as a result of the actions of our Government. Perhaps we are at another of those turning points in the equipment debate, now that the UK has undertaken to train pilots. This is against the background of the rather curious charade which has been played out over previous weapons decisions—I take tanks as an example—whereby the allies start out by saying that a given weapon or munition is either too escalatory to risk in the theatre, too sophisticated for the Ukrainians to master, or insufficient in supply or inappropriate. There were all those things and you could not tell, frankly, whether they were real reasons or excuses but they then vanished at the 11th hour.

This game of red lines being put in place, defended and then lifted at a late hour is a rather odd way of going on. I hope that we can, as an alliance, do less of this in future. There is clearly an important decision to be taken about air power and I hope that the Minister, when he speaks, will be able to respond to the question of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup: where does the UK place its action in offering training for jet aircraft? Is it going to be followed by supply and do we reckon that it is part of a short or immediate response to military need, or is it actually related to a much longer view of the kind of armament that Ukraine will need? It sure is going to have to be an armed country when the war comes to an end.

Turning to the post war for a moment, one has only to think about the consequences of not helping Ukrainians to defend themselves successfully to realise how important that task is. There will be no acceptable basis for ending the fighting if Russian forces have not been driven from Ukrainian territory and are still occupying it. If there is no end to the fighting, there is no basis for negotiation—and no negotiation means no legal basis for security in Europe. I take issue slightly with my former colleague the noble Lord, Lord McDonald, when he says that it is all about Ukraine. A great deal of it is about Ukraine but it is also about European security, and that is why its fight is our fight. It is about European security and the whole of our continent. Clearly, we therefore have to be in a position not only to secure the future of Ukraine as a free and democratic country but to secure a continent in which we can live in reasonable stability.

I want to use the word “peace” but I have a very unhappy feeling that the Europe we will inherit after the end of this war is not going to be quite as peaceable or relaxed, if I put it that way, as the political climate that we have enjoyed since the fall of the wall and German unification. It seems that we are going to be in a more militarised continent, one where our defence spending will be at a higher level on a sustained basis. That will be so for not just this country but the whole of the alliance. We will be coping with an aftermath of decisions and difficulties. This poses the question: are we moving towards an attempt—with success, I hope—at once again resuming co-operative security in Europe, or will we be dealing with a Russia that is contained and where the objective of the exercise is to prevent more damage rather than to return to any kind of active or positive relationship? These seem to be some of the choices that we are going to have to confront.

There are questions of what happens to sanctions, over what period they can be lifted and how we balance the need to demonstrate that there is a cost of war to regimes like Russia’s against the issue of the long-term future of the Russian people—who are also victims of the actions of their leadership. These are going to be very difficult issues. It will behove us to start thinking about how we handle some of them and laying out some of the options for ourselves, because we may have to make very difficult choices and we need to be united about them. There would be nothing worse than the West falling apart when it comes to trying to deal with the consequences and the aftermath of war.

To conclude, I agree very strongly with those who say that the Ukrainians’ fight is our fight because their security is part of ours. While they make the sacrifice with their lives, the least we can do is offer our maximum support to help them towards their success.

Ukraine

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, I was in Germany when the wall fell. It was a marvellous moment to have the whole of our continent back instead of being faced by a line through the middle of Germany—just a few hundred miles from us, after all. That was, for practical purposes, as far east as one could go in those days. I never thought that I would have the pleasure of seeing all that reversed in my lifetime, but it was. Now we travel backwards as Russia occupies Ukraine.

It is pretty clear, I think, that Putin intends to oust President Zelensky and his Government and imprison him if he can, if not worse. A puppet regime will be installed, and the country will be ruled with an iron fist to counter what I think will be the inevitable insurgency.

I have to say, I have some doubts about the thesis that Putin really fears democracy, certainly in any normal sense of the word. I think he has a profound contempt for it, which is why there is some trust in the thesis that he has almost certainly taken on more than he thinks and understands in trying to hang on to a Ukraine that has learned about different ways of running society. I hope that will prove to be the case.

Sadly, as the speeches in this House have already indicated, we should not imagine that this situation is going to be rapidly reversed by economic sanctions: we are talking about years at best, provided sanctions are maintained. What the noble Lord, Lord McDonald, said about China in that respect is well taken. That is an area where we will have to do some work.

In addition to the kleptocracy unit, the Government and the Prime Minister are going to need a large and well-funded—properly funded—unit to chase sanctions evasion. It is certainly going to happen, particularly in a country as well practised in criminality as Russia. On the other hand, effective enforcement may well have some beneficial political effects in that it will undermine the deal that Putin made with the oligarchs that they could make and use their money freely provided that they kept out of politics. Their political neutrality will have been for nothing, so, potentially, some destabilisation of the regime may begin.

As a signatory to the Budapest memorandum, this country has a special obligation to continue to help Ukraine. We cannot, must not, just leave Ukraine to its fate. We should certainly continue to give Ukraine the aid we can, including military aid, though we must be careful not to pursue policies which merely aggravate its suffering.

As other noble Lords have said, there will be an early need for humanitarian aid, and there are going to be refugees. This country will not be on the front line in terms of numbers, but I trust that in the case of those who want to come to the UK, there will not be prolonged arguments as to whether they qualify to do so or whether they can be allowed to work here.

What has happened has much wider significance, of course, than the events in Ukraine, serious and extensive as these are. As other noble Lords have noted, the story of Putin tearing up the paper on which the post-war European order has rested started in 2008 in Georgia, well before the annexation of Crimea in 2014. During that time, he had considerable evidence that the political price to be paid for illegal activity would be low. We have been very slow off the mark in countering Putin’s agenda. Sanctions and reinforcing the borders of NATO to prevent any further land grabs by him are a very important but belated start in reversing the price to Putin of his aggressive policies, but we have to make that price still steeper. The Government need to put more resource and effort behind their correct contention that the security of the Euro-Atlantic area is the UK’s main focus. The peace dividend is long over.

If our aim is to bring about an isolated pariah state, not only must Europe end energy dependence on Russia; we must also increase our political resilience, rendering ineffective Russian malign interference in democracy, Putin’s manipulation of our political processes, and the daily misinformation and disinformation activities of his agencies—in sum, the hybrid warfare of which Russia is such a successful exponent. Other noble Lords have mentioned this, and it is an important part of our broadening policy.

Yesterday, in the other place, the Prime Minister implied that tackling online issues could await the online safety Bill, but that is some way off. We are admittedly in for the long haul, but we cannot wait years to get going on what is a Europe-wide issue, in respect of which some countries are much more vulnerable than the UK.

So, success requires close daily co-ordination across our continent. Ad hoc UK co-operation with the rest of Europe in pursuit of our wider security goals will not be adequate to achieve our aims. We need daily, close, structured co-operation with both the Governments and the institutions of the rest of Europe.