EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in this part of the world as represented in the register, and I join the many people who have already congratulated the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, on a speech that was both deft and comprehensive. It covered almost all the points that I wished to make and certainly everything I wished to agree with. I look forward to hearing a great deal more from him. I welcome this report and found much in it to agree with. I managed to find a few points that I would like to add.

First, Mr Putin is a creature of the post-Cold War world and, unwelcome though it may be to hear it, the West carries some responsibility for creating the conditions that brought him to prominence. Much has been said today and elsewhere about how the West mishandled relationships with Russia. I do not propose to rehearse all that again in detail now. In brief, Russia—humiliated, isolated and increasingly turbulent, and not least as it experienced a very sudden loss of empire—responded to a person who offered a return to strength and respect. To an extent, he has succeeded. But in doing so he has stifled civil society, established total control of the media that shapes public opinion, suborned the judiciary and the rule of law, and embarked on a series of aggressive external adventures, of which Ukraine is but the latest.

Today President Putin, working through a very small clique, is almost synonymous with Russia. He is unpredictable, antagonistic to the West and at the same time seemingly both in total control and beyond any control or accountability—but also seemingly hugely popular. I wonder if things could have been different. If the West had shown a bit more vision and less triumphalism—which now looks horribly like pure hubris—and thought a bit more about working jointly on the concerns that the West and Russia share, I believe that we would not now be facing what the report calls “outright confrontation and competition”. For example, I remember, in 1991, one man in Russian intelligence telling me that the West and the USSR had actually shared a great deal of intelligence on matters such as Northern Ireland during the Cold War, but this co-operation seems to have been discarded almost overnight. He was baffled that the West did not seem to see the common problem that we were going to have with Islamic fundamentalism to the south of Russia. Subsequent events have, of course, proved how tragically prescient those remarks were.

Secondly, I would like to ask one or two potentially uncomfortable questions about sanctions. I support sanctions; they have been necessary, and they have quite understandably been used to punish Russia for the invasion of Crimea. The people and the economy of Russia and other countries have indeed suffered. From a strategic point of view, however, surely we must recognise that Mr Putin is not going to be in some way “brought to heel”. His whole credo and platform are based on the very opposite of this. The situation in Crimea has not been reversed—indeed, as other noble Lords have said, there seems to be a creeping acceptance of it. Can the Minister tell us what evidence there is that sanctions have had any effect in causing Mr Putin to change his mind or his ways? More strategically, what are the likely outcomes if the Russian economy really does crumple under the sanctions, low oil prices and other economic headwinds that have been referred to? Surely the European Union and the Foreign Office must have thought this through to some sort of end game. Finally, how effective will sanctions be if the oil price should recover?

On Ukraine, the report refers to the West as “sleep-walking” into a crisis. I agree with an earlier speaker who felt that that was perhaps unfair, but there is a hideous civil war in Ukraine that is going to take a very long time to resolve. It has already cost thousands of lives. Mr Putin has a collection of frozen conflicts and it is hard to see how he could now return Crimea to Ukraine without humiliation.

We are where we are, and both the West and Mr Putin have made blunders along the way. The only way forward, as I see it, is for the West to make unoccupied Ukraine work economically. That would be hugely expensive—Natalie Jaresko, the Finance Minister from Ukraine, referred to the $40 billion IMF stabilisation bailout as just a first step—and extremely difficult to achieve. But surely it is something that, sooner or later, is going to have to be done. If we fail, Ukraine will remain corrupt and war-torn, a failed state and a basket case on Europe and Russia’s borders. Some would say that that is exactly what Mr Putin wants, but maybe it also holds the germ of an idea for how we could eventually re-engage with Russia on this very difficult issue.

Finally, on Russia itself, we have a good many reasons to criticise Mr Putin and his regime in the strongest terms. However, our difficulty with Russia started much earlier in the missed opportunities of the 1990s. We are now stuck in a cul-de-sac characterised by what this report calls an “adversarial mindset” on both sides. We may never—certainly not while Mr Putin is in charge—see Russia wish to subsume its interests in a wider European community. We cannot ignore Mr Putin’s actions, but we simply cannot allow Russia to become another pariah state and a destabilised and destabilising force. As other speakers have said, we need to base our strategy much more overtly and obviously on three things: a better understanding of how the Russians see themselves; a focus on common areas of interest; and a long-term view that includes the next generation in Russia—it is with them that we are going to find the solution to these problems and not in our own. That approach at least offers some kind of starting point for what I have called before in this House rebooting the relationship with Russia for the long term, whether or not Mr Putin himself remains in the Kremlin in the years ahead.