Ukraine

Lord Bruce of Bennachie Excerpts

Friday 31st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this debate and the strong unanimity which has been shown by our Front Benches and, indeed, right across the House. Like others, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Barrow, whom I have encountered in the past, and I very much appreciate what he had to say and look forward to hearing much more from him.

I want to take noble Lords back to 5 December 1994, when the Budapest memorandum was signed. From Ukraine’s perspective, it was a cast-iron security guarantee in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons. The Russian signatory was Boris Yeltsin. He was replaced by Putin at the end of 1999. Shortly after that, I became a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where I served until 2005. In my early meetings there, there were outspoken voices on the Russian delegation warning of the erosion of democracy within Russia and of Putin’s malign intent. By the time I left the Council of Europe, those voices had disappeared.

The second Chechen war started in 2001. The late Lord Judd, distinguished and much-missed Member of this House, was the rapporteur for the Council of Europe. Russia refused him a visa to visit the region, and the Assembly suspended the voting rights of the Russian delegation. A week later, Tony Blair took Putin to meet the Queen.

My point is that the hostile intent of Putin’s Russia became apparent to me very early on in his rule, but, sadly, the British political establishment refused to recognise it. Indeed, at that time, Conservative MPs even left the mainstream group in the Council of Europe to join the European Democrat Group alongside Putin’s MPs.

The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky—a very brave man, whom I had the privilege of meeting this week—and the seizure of the assets of Yukos, Russia’s most successful post-Soviet company, raised barely a ripple here; the media was not interested. At the time, the Magnitsky scandal went pretty much unnoticed. It took the murder, attempted murder and unexplained deaths of Russian expatriates in the UK to wake people up to the Russian threat. Of course, the most high-profile example of this was Alexander Litvinenko.

Then, in 2008, Russia annexed Ukraine. Still, we did not react. Encouraged by our weakness, Putin invaded in February 2024. Yes, he misjudged it badly; he failed to recognise the resolve of the Ukrainian people. If Budapest meant anything, if the threat to the front-line states needed to be countered, we had to act. We have acted very late and in concert. It was a little ironic that President Trump was proposing to meet President Putin in Budapest of all places.

Nevertheless, the support has so far been enough only to contain the Russians and, for the Ukrainians, exhausted and facing increasing build-up of Russian strength, the situation, as many people have commented, does look bleak. It may be that, over the next five years, the commitments that European states are making will build up a defensive capacity that will fully deter Russia from expansionism. However, with US vacillation and focus on China, the situation could deteriorate very rapidly.

So, what steps can the UK and the coalition of the willing take, first, to enable Ukraine to hold back Russian advances and, secondly, to make the Kremlin understand that it cannot win? We should make it clear that our war is not with the Russian people, many of whom may believe it is the West that is the aggressor, because that is what they have been told. We ended the Cold War and—naively, as it turns out—celebrated a peace dividend, only to arrive at a place today where we have a hot war that is getting hotter.

We should salute the bravery and the resilience of the people of Ukraine, but we should recognise their exhaustion and suffering. They are at the cutting edge of innovation in fighting this kind of war. We should value the strength and realism of the front-line states, as my noble friend and others have said—the Baltics, Finland, Sweden and Romania. They are our front line of defence if Russia moves and are much better equipped than we are to defend us than we are to defend ourselves.

Somehow, we must get across to the United States that swithering and vacillation only encourage Putin, who has to be faced with determination to be convinced that he cannot win. We should not underestimate the extent to which we here in the UK are effectively already at war with Russia. We know what it is doing to our infrastructure and the threats that it is making, and our social media is infiltrated by Russian algorithms designed to sow anger and division. No wonder Nigel Farage and Alex Salmond had a platform on Russia Today. Right now, Putin thinks he can win, and he is playing us along. Unless he believes the price is too high, maybe he will. We really have to step up to make sure he does not.