Ukraine

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a very important point. He is right that we should remember that a considerable part of Ukraine continues to be illegally occupied, with the negative and unwelcome consequences to which he referred.

The United Kingdom, as the noble Lord will be aware, has supported Ukraine for over 30 years since it became a sovereign state in its own right. Since 2015, through Operation Orbital the UK has done what it can to help build what I described earlier as the resilience of the Ukrainian armed forces. We have provided defensive training to over 22,000 Ukrainian troops since 2015. That includes the maritime training initiative, to which I referred, to help the Ukrainian navy rebuild its capacity.

In June last year we entered into an agreement with Ukraine through a memorandum of implementation, which affirmed the UK as open to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons systems as well as training. That principle remains. The noble Lord will possibly be aware that we signed a UK export finance treaty last November to finance the Ukraine naval capabilities enhancement project. That treaty amounts to £1.7 billion of assistance.

That is meaningful help and it might assist your Lordships to understand that this is not just empty rhetoric. The proposal is that there will be missile sale and integration on new and in-service Ukrainian navy patrol and airborne platforms, including a training and engineering support package. There is a going to be development and joint production of eight fast-missile warships with modern defensive armaments. We will also assist with the creation of a new naval base in the Black Sea as a primary fleet for Ukraine and a new base in the Sea of Azov.

What the UK is trying to do in a holistic manner is to come to Ukraine’s aid in helping it to be more ready to defend itself. I think the UK can be satisfied with, and justly admired for, the help it has been giving. It has not been doing that alone, of course. As the noble Lord will be aware, the United States has been assisting as well.

The United Kingdom is very conscious of the extremely sensitive position in which Ukraine finds itself, not least because of the issues to which the noble Lord referred, but we are doing a number of very substantive things to assist it.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

The Minister was right to emphasise the importance of respecting the sovereignty of Ukraine. In 1989, I was privileged to be in Lviv in Ukraine at the time of the pro-democracy rallies there, when they were trying to throw off the hegemony of the Kremlin. Does the Minister agree that part of the Putin narrative is the recreation of the Soviet Union and that his regime is pushing in every direction it can to try to achieve that?

I particularly welcome what the Secretary of State for Defence said yesterday in pointing to Vladimir Putin’s 7,000-word essay, which has ethnonationalism at its heart. Only one paragraph mentions what the Secretary of State calls

“the straw man of NATO”;

in other words, this is an excuse to talk about NATO when there is a whistle blowing from the Kremlin, trying to whip up ancient hatreds.

Are we western nations not in danger of falling into the Byzantine trap? The Byzantines, when they had the enemy at the gates, were arguing about the gender of angels. Is it not important that, despite the vested interests the West has in gas, oil and the rest, we stand together and recognise what the people of Ukraine fought for in 1989 in seeking their independence and stand with them at this terrible time of trial?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I think very few people would disagree with the noble Lord’s sentiments and I thank him for his reference to the comments by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. I think an earlier contributor mentioned his article in the Times yesterday. I thought it was an extremely helpful analysis and a very clear illustration that in the West we totally understand what is happening and see through it. I think there is a need for that candour and that rigour.

I feel that in the current situation there is a need to be absolutely focused on where the immediate threat lies. As we speak, something like 100,000 Russian military are amassed on the borders of Ukraine. That is the actual threat and that is why we have to address our thoughts to how best we support Ukraine with a variety of measures, whether that is what we were doing in supplying from the UK these weapons that can be used in a defensive capacity, whether it is that we propose to apply sanctions if anything unacceptable happens, or whether it is that NATO and the EU are united as to a response against anything that President Putin may be minded to do which, quite simply, is unacceptable, contravenes international law and is an affront to the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine.