Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, who has long experience of the OSCE. I accompanied him during a 2011 IPU visit to Kosovo, where the OSCE still has a major presence. I returned to Kosovo with the IPU a month ago to find that most of the current Balkan gloom is not about Russia, but about Brexit.

We think again of the troubles of Ukraine and Crimea, but the wider context is the humiliation felt by most Russians since the collapse of the Soviet Union. President Putin has been able to conjure up old Russia with all its conservatism and Orthodox Christianity, and we have to remember that both medieval Rus and the industrial heartland of the Donbas were and are firmly set in Ukraine. None of that can excuse the illegal annexations or the outright aggression and dirty tricks performed by Putin’s agents and the military in recent years, but it helps to explain why many Russians feel a little more national pride today, while still putting up with corruption and appalling human rights violations, as Russians always have. It explains why we have to work harder towards dialogue through organisations such as the OSCE.

The OSCE is a superb example of soft power. It is an obscure organisation, but that may not matter unless we have high political ambitions for it, which I think would be a mistake. I know that some used to see it as a might-have-been alternative to NATO. The European Leadership Network advocates better use of its conflict prevention centre, and there have been many attempts at reform, not least those described in the short debate led by the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, which was fascinating for facts such as that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, trained Kazakh officials preparing for the OSCE presidency, which I did not know.

In February 2015, 11 months after Crimea was annexed, our EU External Affairs Sub-Committee, of which I was a member, published its report The EU and Russia: Before and Beyond the Crisis in Ukraine. One finding of the report was that neither the EU nor its members had adequate understanding of Russia or the necessary analytical skills to interpret what was happening there. Georgia’s then ambassador, Dr Gachechiladze, said that there was,

“not a good understanding of Russia in the West”,

and our then Europe Minister, David Lidington, said that by 2014,

“there were very few officials in any government department”,

with expertise from the old Soviet era.

Other witnesses confirmed that relations between Russia and the EU had suffered from political neglect.

Yet Russia and Europe, historically and economically, have always had to come to terms. We have only to look at the map of natural gas entering Europe from Russia to realise that there is already a degree of interdependence with several EU states. Meanwhile, the war around Donetsk and Luhansk rages on, almost unreported in this country. Detailed bulletins from the OSCE’s special monitoring mission provide evidence of fighting and breaches of ceasefire on a daily basis.

Could it be that we here are out of touch with the conflict in Ukraine? Despite its historic connections with Poland and Russia, Ukraine remains a vast blank in the minds even of those who know about Eastern Europe. While the loss of Crimea hit most of us, I am not sure how much the daily fighting in Ukraine really matters to British people. I was surprised that last week’s defence debate, which dealt considerably with our Armed Forces’ capability, barely touched on security in Europe or the situation in the Balkans or Ukraine.

Our sub-committee took evidence on the OSCE, especially from Dr Tom Casier of Kent University, who felt that it lacked legitimacy and had been ineffective as a security mechanism. Both he and Vladimir Chizhov, the Russian ambassador to the EU, said that there should be a new security architecture which included Russia and NATO and OSCE members. We recommended,

“a serious dialogue on issues of shared interest”,

building on a range of agreements, cultural exchanges and common spaces between the EU and Russia. The OSCE conference in Rome in March last year called for a much stronger, more strategic EU-OSCE partnership.

In the sub-committee, we recognised that Russian perceptions of NATO as a security threat had to be acknowledged, while also challenged. We have to try harder to understand Russian fears of EU and NATO expansion. EU enlargement may be on hold, post-Trump and post-Brexit, with Brussels talking more of multitrack solution, as already applied to Romania and Bulgaria, but hearts and minds are still being won, and western influence in Ukraine presents a problem for President Putin. NATO ensures that Russian military expansion has been contained although, unsurprisingly, OSCE members have been unable to implement the Minsk 2 agreement, and dirty tricks continue.

In Crimea, all opposition to Russia by Tatar leaders and Ukrainian activists has been cruelly put down. Direct political interference continues all over the Balkans. Serbia’s continuing claim to northern Kosovo is undoubtedly backed by Russia. I could see examples of this on the bridge at Mitrovica and the other business with the train plastered with slogans saying, “Kosovo is Serbian”. How can Serbia be allowed to continue on a path to EU membership if it behaves like this?

My forebear, Samuel Morton Peto, built the first-ever railway in battle from Sebastopol to the front line. Of course, as a European, I do not feel that I am on any front line or have any claims on Crimea, except to wish that its people will gain more freedom from the Russian torments that they have suffered over many years. I hope that, in future, we can hold a much fuller debate on relations with Russia, because discussion of the OSCE undoubtedly raises much wider questions, including our own future post-Brexit foreign policy in the region.