The Ukraine Effect (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, for this report and the noble Lord, Lord Levene, for his valedictory speech. I am sure that he has contributed much to the House and will continue after he leaves us to make a distinguished contribution to public life.

I have reminded this House on many occasions that you can rewrite your history but you cannot do much about your geography. That is part of the problem here. The fact of the matter is that this Parliament on all sides has been very silent about what we are actually doing. We have not said, as we should have said, to the pensioners of Britain, that their winter fuel payment is exactly the same sum of money that we are sending to the Ukraine. We have not levelled with the British population at all.

I went to the Ukraine many times between about 1998 and 2014. I gave up in 2014, because it was evident to me that Ukraine was then going to fall apart. It was never a single country; it was always the country of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which we should remember was added to western Ukraine and confirmed at the Crimea conference as belonging to Ukraine, which was of course seen as part of the Soviet Union.

It pains me to say so but, if you look back in history, you can see that sanctions have never worked. They did not work in Abyssinia, and they have not worked since. I had an email yesterday—many noble Lords may have had it—from a group called Spotlight on Corruption. It was not about the Ukraine, which is pretty corrupt; it was about Britain. It says:

“Weak enforcement has long been the Achilles’ heel of the UK’s fight against economic crime”.


It says that

“the powers available to UK enforcement authorities are stronger”

but court challenges to UK sanctions have so far failed and criminal and civil enforcement has been weak.

I am not surprised, in a way. If people cast their minds away from the dancing in Samoa to the actual conference in Kazan, and the Russian group, they will see that sanctions are not working. I have Russian friends—not people in high places, but people who live in cities in Russia. They will tell you, “We’ve got round the sanctions. Yes, it’s difficult and we’ve had to make substitutions”. As one of them said, “Ikea has gone, but my uncle has managed to take over the factory, and we now have a Russian Ikea in our family”. One advantage, of course, of the collapse of communism is that capitalism has moved in to fill the gap that sanctions have caused.

We have made no attempt to discover what the real, underlying problems are. I was in Crimea before it was taken over. I was in Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol, and it was clear that, when the Ukrainian Government decided to outlaw the Russian language as a means of communication in schools they were going to annoy a lot of people, to put it mildly. Of course, one difficulty with Viktor Orbán is that Transcarpathia, which is part of the Ukraine, used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and used to have Hungarian schools there—and they were suddenly told that they could no longer use the Hungarian language. That is just glossed over; it is not reported or looked at. I am not in the least surprised that sanctions have not worked.

A new officer in the Trump Administration, Tulsi Gabbard, has said that the United States provoked the Russians in Ukraine. That is undoubtedly true. There was a lady from the State Department, Victoria Nuland, who spent years doing just that. Of course, Ukraine must be fully represented in any peace negotiations, because we do not want a “stab in the back” philosophy to grow up. Ukraine has to be there and has to accept whatever is negotiated.

From time to time, President Zelensky has demonstrated a willingness to do this, but he has been bullied and pushed around, particularly by the United States and to a lesser extent by us. The Ukraine must be part of the negotiation. It must be at the table and accept the outcome, but I am not sure that outcome is exactly what our foreign policy supremos have been driving at for the last few years. We need another look at this.