Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 21st September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, we seem to have hit the realistic point here. I start by agreeing completely with the previous speaker that there will be a reckoning. I made several visits to Ukraine between 2000 and 2016, the time at which it basically started to fall to pieces.

We forget; we talk about Ukraine as though it were an historic country, but the borders have changed three times in the past 100 years. They changed after Versailles, when part of Ukraine which was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire came out of it when Poland was created and the borders were set. They changed again in 1945 when, as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the Russians took part of Poland into Russian territory. At the end of the war, Churchill did a deal with Stalin not to give it back, so the western borders of Ukraine embraced what was part of Poland. To compensate, Churchill agreed that Poland would get some of Germany. The eastern part of Germany was therefore taken into Poland, and the dispute over what we call the Oder-Neisse line carried on until the days of Willy Brandt. Even today, within the AfD—the extreme right-wing party—there is still talk about the lost territories.

Let us not pretend that the boundaries have been very stable, because of course finally Crimea became part of Ukraine only when Khrushchev, the ex-secretary-general of the Ukrainian Communist Party before he became leader of the USSR, gave Crimea to Ukraine as a present. All this was done because no one could see that there would ever be an end to the USSR: Stalin did not and Khrushchev did not. This is what we are up against.

When I first went to Ukraine, someone I christened “Authoritarian Grandpa” was in charge, Leonid Kuchma. He had a pretty good idea about how to run Ukraine: it was to keep it on a pretty short lead, restrict the freedoms overall, and give just enough play for the west and the east to live together. That carried on through the first 10 or 12 years of this century but then, after 2004 and the so-called revolution, the United States in particular and the EU spent years destabilising Ukraine. There is no doubt about it whatever, and if the papers are ever released it will be seen that that was what was going on. By 2014, Putin lost his temper. He also lost his sense of judgment, incidentally, because the way he took Crimea was absolutely illegal and wrong, but none the less he did it.

Between then and the outbreak of the war, there was constant tension between Russia and Ukraine and, frankly, we did little to help. We had the Minsk accords; we had France and Germany supposedly trying to broker a deal, but it was never adhered to and there was never much attempt to make it happen. Part of the reason for the whole problem in Ukraine was, first, the way we reacted. The end of Ukraine really came when Viktor Yanukovych was chased out after the second revolution. From then on, there was really no hope, because Yanukovych represented the east. He was based in Donetsk. I met his party members in Donetsk: they thought that he was their great god. He was not. But in the west, he had no support whatever. There, it was Tymoshenko and the rest of the elite who were in charge, so the country was really breaking up before one’s eyes. Indeed, I decided not to go back after witnessing a local election in Dnipro that was so badly run that I thought, “This country is beyond help”.

Anyway, that is where we are and that is how we ended up in the position today. There is no doubt whatever that Putin committed an illegal act; there is no doubt that he should not have invaded Ukraine; there is also no doubt that he felt at his wits’ end, but he made an amazing misjudgment. God knows what his secret service told him, but it is quite clear that he totally misjudged the strength of Ukraine.

We are now, let us remind ourselves, in a proxy war. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, reminded us of how the Russians left Afghanistan. He could have reminded us of how the Americans left Afghanistan. It might be worth remembering that we are fighting a proxy war in Ukraine. The United States is contributing probably 80%, certainly 70%, of all the help being given; meanwhile, Europe squabbles. We have given some assistance—Britain has given more than anyone else in Europe—but I heard this morning on my Brussels newscast that Warsaw has decided to end military aid to Ukraine because of the dispute over grain. Hungary is very chary of doing anything useful, because there is still a Hungarian minority there. When Ukraine had a Government, they spent the years between 2017 and 2020 trying to eliminate the teaching of Hungarian in the school system of Ukraine’s Hungarian region. That does not endear you to the country you are living in. There has been a lot of tension ever since.

Where do we go from here? The noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, made the very good point that we must look beyond where we are. Our priority should be the defence of those countries that are in NATO. To do that, we have an end to the war in Ukraine, because we have to get the Russians back to the table and a Helsinki-type agreement on how far they can go. If we do not and end up in a stalemate, they will next start threatening the Baltics, which are NATO countries. I would not have gone quite as far with the expansion of NATO or the EU, but we have done it, and that is where we owe our first responsibility. We should be looking at and talking to those countries—looking at how we strengthen the NATO presence in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, give support along the long Finnish border and make them feel that they are a secure part of our family.

The last thing we should be thinking of is bringing Ukraine, Georgia or anyone else into NATO. We should be thinking about how we get a ceasefire, how we get the Russians to the table and how we defend the NATO countries that we are already committed to.