Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I extend my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, who I am sure will read this in Hansard.

I had a letter last week from Mishcon de Reya. I thought that anyone who could afford that level of lawyer did not need me, so I deleted it unread.

I would like to correct or clarify one point. A number of people have referred to Nord Stream 2. The Germans have not cancelled it; they have interrupted its approval procedure, which is quite different. If they cancelled it they would be liable for a very large sum of money, so at the moment it is just paused.

Many of us were dismayed by what happened yesterday, particularly as in endless meetings I and others have been assured that Russia had no intention of invading Ukraine. The Russian ambassador said that to me in very clear words. As I said yesterday, either his Government did not trust him enough to tell him what they were doing or he did not know what they were doing anyway. That is not a very good start for an ambassador, is it?

We should not underestimate Putin. He was very careful: he made sure from Macron, Scholz and Biden that there would be no military intervention in support of Ukraine. He is not a fool, although sometimes we think he is; on a good day he is quite shrewd. He knew that if he invaded Ukraine we would do nothing—and we have not let him down, have we? All we are doing is having debates.

There are two countries next to Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, that are very different daughters; they remind me of “King Lear”. Belarus is the dutiful daughter that represses its population, denies democracy and is the subject of much angst; it is not even a member of the Council of Europe. However, I am sorry to say that Ukraine has constantly pinpricked Russia by trying to cancel the base in Crimea, trying to mandate that only Ukrainian can be spoken—which is pretty daft if you consider the number of Russian speakers there—and all sorts of other annoyances. There has been a constant pattern of difficulty between Ukraine and Russia. I saw it playing out every time I went to the Council of Europe: the Russians sat there, pretty dumb and not doing much, while Ukraine never lost an opportunity to have a go at them. I am not surprised that Russia got pretty fed up with it.

We now move on to the field of sanctions. I do not wish to rain on the parade, but sanctions do not have a very good record. If we are going to make them work then we have to study quite hard what we want to do. The only sanctions that I know of that worked were the CoCom sanctions, and that is because the US held a very close grip on the export of technologies beyond trusted friends. So I say to the Minister that we need to look carefully at how we perform the sanctions regime, because clearly the sanctions that we appear to have announced so far will not bring anyone down in a month of Sundays. They are tokenism. Until we get to grips with Russian influence and money in London, we will not get very far. It is worth remembering that there is also quite a lot of Ukrainian billionaire money in London.

I say to the Minister that we need to start from the point where we are now. The most important thing for us to do is to get a common position on the NATO members in the east, because they are different. We have to defend them. We have to assure the Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania that they are part of the family, and we defend the family. That is what our priority should be now, not only chasing the Russians but making sure that we can reassure our other friends.