Ukraine

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

Yesterday was a sad, bad day for Ukraine, Europe and the world. First, our feelings are of course with the Ukrainian people, who are in for a prolonged period of struggle and suffering.

I fully support everything that the Government are doing by way of sanctions. Whether the sanctions should be more than they are, I leave to other people who are better qualified than me. Put simply, they will have to be applied not just massively and rigorously but over a potentially long period. Putin has built up a war chest of some $630 billion to see him through the immediate effects of sanctions. Then, of course, his policy is to create facts on the ground and see whether he gets away with it if he holds on long enough.

Russian forces are still in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, camped only 20 miles from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Even now, a long time after the 2008 war, they are still in Crimea; of course, they were also in eastern Europe for a long time. Putin will create facts on the ground and, as the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, said, the likely scenario of a puppet Government means that this will last perhaps years, even decades. The question is: have we the will and the staying power to keep going for a long period and not allow everything from Putin’s point of view simply to go back to business more or less as normal?

The invasion of Ukraine by Putin creates a tragic dilemma, which I call the nuclear paradox. Massive arsenals of nuclear weapons owned by NATO and Russia make a major nuclear war morally impossible yet, at the same time, make acts of aggression below that more possible. We have that kind of situation in Ukraine. President Biden has said, no doubt rightly, that we will not be putting troops into Ukraine, which simply leaves us with sanctions. The question is not only whether those sanctions will be massive and rigorously applied but whether we are prepared to sustain them for a long period.

One of the features of the crisis over recent months that I have found particularly distressing is the amount of totally false information that has been fed to the Russian people—the number of grotesque lies, as other noble Lords have said. Sadly, despite some heroic resistance to the Putin regime, his popularity in Russia has remained high. We do not know what it will be after the invasion of Ukraine, but I would not be surprised if that massive state propaganda machine has twisted the minds of so many people. This brings to the fore the importance of truth in public life. No doubt every power has its own form of propaganda; that is inevitable. However, if we have a free press and media, at least in the long run those lies can be exposed for what they are. We do stand for something worthwhile, which in the end comes down to truth in the public sphere.

Ukraine has been carved up and divided between many empires over the centuries: Polish-Lithuanian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Tsarist. However, both in 1917, before the Soviets took over, and at the end of the Cold War in 1991, it voted decisively for its own autonomy to rule its own affairs. It is quite true, as Putin rightly emphasises, that there are long historic, cultural and religious links between Ukraine and Russia. Orthodox Christianity came to Russia from Kyivan Rus’. Yet invading a country is hardly the way to strengthen those historic, cultural and religious links.

Finally, I return to my first point. I have often returned to the words that TS Eliot wrote in 1939, reflecting on the events of 1938 in Munich. He said that he and many others were shaken in a way from which one does not recover. It was not so much the politics and the events but a general plight. It was not the criticism of a particular Government but a doubt about the validity of a particular civilisation. Did our society,

“which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude”,

have

“any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?”

The struggle from 1939 to 1945 showed that we did. Today, with the direct use of military force rightly ruled out, that question will be even more searching now than it was then.