Ukraine

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Friday 26th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I offer my own welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Camoys, and congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. If I may make so bold, his relative youth, which I welcome, reminds me that the Oxford Union will debate the situation in Ukraine at its meeting on 22 February. The motion will be:

“This house believes Ukraine should negotiate with Russia to end the war now”.


I have been invited to speak in that debate and although I have much sympathy with the motion, I intend to oppose it. My grounds for doing so will undoubtedly benefit from what I have already heard and will hear today, but they are primarily based on a self-derived and clinically strategic view that it is not in our national interest to encourage or pressurise Ukraine to seek peace.

Why do I say this? If we pause to remind ourselves of the situation at the outbreak of the current phase of Russian aggression in Ukraine two years ago, there is a general consensus that Putin made a strategic miscalculation in ordering his invasion. The miscalculation was based on three underpinning assumptions. He assumed that Ukraine’s armed forces were weak, that Russia’s armed forces were strong, and that NATO lacked the political integrity and military capability to act in a coherent way. All three assumptions, in different ways, proved wrong.

The relevant issue from a UK position is not that Putin was internally misled about the quality of his own armed forces or that he misjudged the integrity and resilience of the Ukrainian people, but that he did not think that NATO would respond in a united or militarily meaningful way. Putin thought this because he had more than enough evidence to support the view that NATO was internally fractured, underfunded, globally distracted, wafer thin in respect of war-fighting resilience, and optimised for cyclical training rather than conventional deterrence. Remarkably, the UK’s refresh of the integrated review did not concede this major strategic point: that NATO, and the UK as the leading European nation in NATO, had failed in their primary task of conventional deterrence in Europe.

In fairness, NATO and the UK should be congratulated in that they have done rather better than Putin assumed. Indeed, the subsequent success of NATO has been in its ability to maintain the war in Ukraine as—in terms that military professionals would use—limited: limited in both geography and the means employed. The limitation on the means employed needs further explanation.

The calibration of NATO support for Ukraine must be, and is being, very carefully assessed as sufficient to keep Ukraine in the fight, but not so significant as to bring about a humiliation of Russia that risks an escalation of force beyond the tactical nuclear threshold. I wholly accept the moral and ethical challenge that this situation represents. To sustain an ally in a war that it cannot be permitted to decisively win is a deeply questionable policy from a moral perspective. However, the risk of nuclear escalation, even of a tactical nature, represents an overriding concern that justifies the questionable morality of the policy.

The situation on the ground in Ukraine today has many of the hallmarks of a self-hurting stalemate en route to a frozen conflict, but only in a localised sense. The frozen conflict on land might result in some element of conflict termination, but there are absolutely no grounds to pursue any hope yet of conflict resolution. I do not believe, as many others have said today, that military means alone will bring about the context for such a resolution.

In the meantime, what should the UK and NATO do in military terms? I offer three things. First, NATO should continue to calibrate its military support for Ukraine in an ever more coherently funded and programmed way, but also in a way that maintains the limited nature of the conflict. The desire should, of course, be for Ukraine to enjoy incremental tactical advantage on land, but it should also recognise that a decisive outcome of the land battle is highly unlikely. A greater strategic advantage can more easily be achieved, for example, in the Black Sea, or by the wider erosion of the Russian will.

Secondly, and as a part of the erosion of Russian will, NATO should re-establish the effective conventional deterrence of Russia. A lot is involved in this, but primarily it is about providing the resources to re-establish NATO’s war-fighting resilience. It is also about deploying NATO forces, not in some elegant and wholly inefficient force-generation cycle, but in accordance with a general defence plan optimised to convey an unmistakable deterrent message.

Thirdly, NATO should have the strategic patience to accept that, so long as Ukraine is prepared to fight—and, in truth, continue to erode the Russian threat to Europe by proxy—we should not dictate the terms on which Ukraine should seek to resolve the conflict. It must certainly not be pressured into seeking to resolve the conflict on terms that its people cannot accept or that Russia could present as victory, or from which Russia could seek to derive encouragement for future aggression.

The lesson in all this for the current or any future UK Government is simple. They and we must remember the simple paradox on which armed forces are built: the better they are, the less likely they will need to be used. The hollowing out of the United Kingdom’s conventional Armed Forces over the last 20 years has been a significant contributory factor to recent Russian aggression. Governments should take serious and urgent note of military advocacy that seeks to rebuild military deterrent capability. The failure to make that investment has brought about the current more dangerous and far more expensive situation.

I look forward to finding out in a couple of weeks what the young and lively minds of Oxford are thinking. I travel in the perhaps naive hope that, in the strategic context of 2024, they may be thinking that investing in defence is more important than tax giveaways.