Ukraine

Lord Empey Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, on his maiden speech. I hope he enjoyed listening to himself—certainly, we enjoyed listening to him. He was of course a Northern Ireland Minister at one point and I share the recollection from the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, of a trade trip he led to Washington some years ago which I had the pleasure of participating in. I have no doubt that we will hear interesting contributions from him in the days and months ahead.

There is a risk of a self-congratulatory mood around the House today because, by and large, with some tweaks here and there, we all share a general approach of support for Ukraine. The tragedy is that we are in this mess because of failures some years ago. We did nothing when Crimea was invaded; we carried on with business as usual and our German colleagues made themselves almost wholly dependent on Russian gas. We have seen where that has led us.

There is another thing that Putin is banking on. He is looking back to the 1930s: “Well, we only went into the Rhineland—our back yard”. We are repeating the same thing all over again. He has judged, pretty accurately, that, when push comes to shove, many of our colleagues do not have the bottle or appetite for this. The war of attrition of course suits him. Historically, Russia has been a giant sponge—a vast geographical area that absorbs armies. One after the other has tried and failed. Yes, the Ukrainians have punched through the border and occupy a piece of land; that is fine from their point of view, but Russia is a vast nation and Putin controls all the high ground of propaganda and so on, so it is hard to judge what the impact will be.

As for the western response, yes, there have been weapons but, as other speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, have pointed out, they have come late and with limitations. There have been delays. At the end of the day, how long can we ask an invaded population to be in the trenches and see their country destroyed around them when they are doing a job for all of us in the democratic world? We have to recalibrate what we are doing.

We have made this mistake even more recently. We had the Arab spring not that long ago—and what did we do there? There were speeches from this building encouraging the Syrians to resist, but we did not lift a finger when the red line of chemical weapons was crossed. Putin has moved into that country and has a warm-water port; he has taken over the whole place, destroyed the country and got Assad back into office. Now we are trying to pave the way to reintegrate Assad into the western world. The fact is that our eyes are bigger than our belly. We say the right things but, if you are not prepared to put boots on the ground, shut up and stay out of it, because these things will never be settled by meetings in committee rooms in Whitehall or elsewhere.

There has to be a reinvigoration of the political long-term objectives because, the way things are going, we are allowing the Ukrainians to be ground down. Allowing Russia get into a grinding war is the worst thing we could possibly have done. It does not care how many people it loses, by and large. There will be no political repercussions. It is not using the elites around Moscow and St Petersburg, but impoverished people from regions miles away who have absolutely no political influence over Putin whatever.

We now have the potential arrival, in some form or other, of North Koreans. Whether they will replace troops or will be used to try to flush out the Ukrainians from the Kursk region or whatever, they will free up Russian forces for the front line. This is the biggest single escalation since the war commenced its next phase in February 2022. What are we going to do about it? What is NATO going to do about it? The failure came at the very outset when people could see the tanks building up north of Kyiv. The President of the United States could have rung up Putin and said, “If one of your tanks accidentally crosses that border, I will destroy it”. The defensive posture of NATO has been challenged and called out, and we have fallen at the first fence. So we have to rethink things, be much more vigorous and make our minds up. Do we want to take this on or not? We are using the poor people of Ukraine to be crushed and destroyed. That would be a worse sin.