Ukraine

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

I join with others in welcoming my noble friend Lord Sedwill and his remarkable, notable and distinguished maiden speech.

Yesterday during a meeting, the Ukrainian ambassador described to me fighting in the government district of Kyiv as President Zelensky continued to work from his office. What more can the Minister tell us about the safety of President Zelensky, his family and his Cabinet—and, if necessary, about providing a place of safety for a Government in exile?

I will say something about justice and the rule of law. On 1 July 2019, Ukraine recognised the International Criminal Court and, in 2020, signed the Rome statute. It has made two special ad hoc declarations under Article 12(3) of the statute, giving the ICC jurisdiction over crimes perpetrated on its territories from November 2013 onward. First, the Maidan demonstrations and, after later events, the prosecutor’s preliminary examination concluded that there was a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity had already been committed. Yesterday, we saw why the ICC should now take urgent next steps, requesting authorisation from the Pre-Trial Chamber to investigate Putin’s invasion and his contempt for the rule of law. Impunity for previous crimes simply begets further crime.

The ICC is a court of last resort. The Government’s law officers should urgently liaise with the prosecutor about prioritising the case of Ukraine and requesting authorisation to investigate, and ultimately prosecute, the perpetrators. Unlike a referral via the Security Council, such an action could not be vetoed by Russia. The evidence of such crimes is written across the scarred face of a woman on the front pages of our newspapers today whose apartment in Kyiv was bombed yesterday. Russia’s military and political leaders must be put on notice that they, and the members of the Russian Duma who voted for this act of aggression, need to know that, in addition to welcome economic sanctions, their future ability to travel to any of the 123 countries which have ratified the Rome statute will leave them open to arrest and being brought to justice.

Then there is the question of self-defence. I was shocked by reports that Estonia was stopped by Germany from sending munitions to Ukraine over its territory. Notwithstanding its welcome decision on Nord Stream 2, when one NATO country stops another NATO country from assisting in self-defence and upholding liberty and democracy, what does that say about our unity and shared values as an alliance? As the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, said, NATO has kept the peace and is not an instrument for territorial conquest. Putin, not NATO, is the aggressor, and Ukraine shows that NATO must be recalibrated and united for these dangerous times.

The US has 35,000 troops defending 400 million Europeans, who themselves have a $21 trillion economy. The US pays 75% of NATO’s costs. The UK, to its credit, meets 2% of the NATO contribution. It is high time that Germany and the others did the same. We, too, must carefully recalibrate and reconsider the cuts to our armed forces—to which the noble Lord, Lord West, and others, referred—our strategic deficiencies, about which my noble and gallant friend Lord Stirrup has written this week, and our overdependency on hostile actors.

In 1989, we celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Iron Curtain. We do not need another one. Yesterday, we saw thousands of people carrying backpacks and dragging suitcases to the Ukrainian border following Putin’s invasion—wickedly adding to the 82 million people who are already displaced or refugees in the world today. There are predictions of 5 million more displacements. Poland alone is preparing to receive up to 1 million refugees. The UNHCR has warned of “devastating humanitarian consequences”. Putin and Lukashenko cynically use refugees as cannon fodder. What are we doing to open safe routes and contain this human catastrophe?

Finally, I have never forgotten the sheer courage and determination of pro-democracy activists whom I met on the streets of Lviv in 1989 as they risked their lives to throw off the shackles and chains of the Soviet Union. I met people who had spent most of two decades in Soviet prisons and families who had, in the previous generation, lost loved ones to Stalin’s Holodomor: the man-made famine that convulsed Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 and led to millions of deaths. Paradoxically, today many countries—especially in the Maghreb and Middle East—rely on Ukrainian wheat to feed their people. How will we deal with that? As other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Collins, have said, what will we do to ensure that the truth—often usually the first casualty in the fog of war—is heard via the BBC World Service and social media? In 1989, Ukraine began to replace pain with hope. In inflicting more pain, Putin outrageously suggests that Ukraine never existed and should no longer exist. However long it takes, we must prove him wrong.