EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to hear the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, demonstrate how viable it can be to this House to have the participation in our debates of an intelligent former member of the Diplomatic Service. It has been a very long wait, I can tell you.

When I served in the embassy in Moscow, nearly 50 years ago, our boss in London, the superintending under-secretary, was a ferocious man who spoke 14 European languages and had spent the war in Moscow and Kuibyshev, where the embassies were moved when Hitler’s army got near Moscow. He demanded quite a high standard of analytical skills from those who worked for or to him, and of course in the embassy it was a sine qua non that everybody spoke Russian. Our ambassador was an extremely lucky man, because he not only spoke brilliant Russian but was lucky enough to be the brother of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock.

That is a shameless hook on which to hang the fact that I greatly regret the news that the noble Baroness will stand down from our House this week. I speak only for myself, but I think the whole House will agree that the penetration and focus of the intelligence and judgment that she has brought to bear in our debates has been extremely striking. It used to light up both the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, it has lit up our debates, and we will miss her very greatly indeed.

The point in the excellent report by the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, on analytical skills is correct. The Foreign Office has lost a good deal of the expertise that Duncan Wilson and Tom Brimelow had, but it may have something to do with lack of resources; relatively speaking, and absolutely, the Foreign Office is much less well resourced now than it was then.

On the substance of the report, one has to start with Crimea. President Putin has now admitted in a public interview that he decided on 22 February last year to annex Crimea. That was three weeks before the sham referendum on the Crimean peninsula. He made up his mind even before there was any attempt to generate a grievance among the Russian speakers. The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities had just confirmed that there was no threat to the Russian-speaking people in Crimea. The whole excuse for annexation was manufactured.

I am not terribly happy with the Minsk agreements for many reasons, but one of them is that they say nothing about Crimea. Moreover, the European Council has, in a way, added to the problem by deciding that the sanctions would terminate in December, when the Minsk programme terminated—if one were to assume, perhaps implausibly, that the Russians carry out the full Minsk programme—so it is entirely related to action pertaining to the Donbass. What about Crimea? Is a policy of non-recognition quite enough as a response to the first major change in the post-war settlement and a breach of all our basic texts, including the Helsinki text and the Paris charter? Is it enough just to look the other way? In particular, is it enough for this country, as a signatory of the Budapest memorandum of 1994? Then, with our partners the Americans, the Ukrainians and the Russians, we committed ourselves to ensuring that the territorial integrity of Ukraine was respected, that no economic pressure was brought on Ukraine and that no violence, or threat of the use of violence, was brought against Ukraine. The Russians have clearly breached all three commitments. What do we do? Do we do nothing at all? It does not add to the credibility of such texts if we do nothing at all. The Ukrainians would not be in the fix that they are in today if they had retained the nuclear weapons that we and the Americans urged them to hand over. They handed them over in exchange for this text, but is it just a bit of paper? It has John Major’s name on it, and John Major is an honourable man. Would it not be dishonourable to do nothing about it now?

I have grave doubts about whether sanctions will do the trick. Sanctions do some damage, but the sanctions that do most damage to the Russian in the street are the counter sanctions on Russia’s imports of our western consumer goods and foodstuffs. There are shortages in the shops; the Russians see that and they blame NATO—they blame us. It has accentuated the spiral of the narrative of plucky little Russia under threat from the wicked West. I can see that if you tightened sanctions so that they actually affected the Putin inner circle, as the American sanctions do and ours do not, you might achieve more. But, frankly, I do not think that this will be done by sanctions, and it will not be done by a ceasefire, which will probably be honoured no better than it has been in the past.

We have to raise Putin’s perception of the price to him of carrying on doing what he is doing to Ukraine. We first need to convince him that we would not let Ukraine collapse economically and not let it go completely down the tubes. The report by the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, has an interesting suggestion at paragraph 282 that we call an international conference of potential donors. I do not know about that. I certainly think that it would be very good to know the Government’s view about that. The Finance Minister of Ukraine was in London yesterday seeing the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Did Mr Osborne offer any help? I do not know, but I hope that we are offering help.

On the question of arms, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. I think we need to convince President Putin that we would not let Ukraine’s defence forces collapse. I am not arguing that we should send UK Armed Forces, and neither is President Poroshenko, but he is asking for people to send arms. If we regard Ukraine as an independent country and regard him as its legitimate leader, does he not have a right to self-defence? I have difficulty with the argument that it is provocative to the aggressor to assist the victim, and that appears to be the argument: the Russians would not like it, so let us not do it. I do not buy that argument.

I agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, said about NATO. I think that is exactly right. It needs to be clear that Article 5 means something to us. I entirely agree with that, but I disagree with those in the US Congress who argue that we now need to see tactical nuclear weapons deployed in the Baltic states and in Poland. That seems to me very rash. We should stick to the 1996 NATO position that there is no plan, intention or reason for the forward deployment of tactical nuclear forces.

Conversely, I think that the Americans were wrong as regards the 2008 NATO communiqué and the invitation to Ukraine and Georgia to join the alliance. That was a mistake. It would be good to make it clear to all parties that it is a dead letter, that NATO’s invitation is not currently open, and that the Ukrainian regime is not currently seeking such an invitation. If that could be codified in some way, it might contribute to finding a solution, because I do not think that the solution lies in ceasefires or sanctions but in finding a settlement. One needs to find out what President Putin wants and see to what extent that is compatible with what is right for Ukraine—a judgment for President Poroshenko.

The committee is right to suggest that there is a dialogue to be had between the Eurasian Economic Union and the EU. It is also right to suggest that the President of the European Council, the former Prime Minister of Poland, has a very important part to play in this, not just operationally but given that he is who he is.

There is one last thing for us to do that is really rather important. I apologise to the noble Lord opposite for carrying on, but I did speak about general matters for a moment or two at the start of my speech. Yesterday, I was surprised to note that the Prime Minister’s Statement on the European Council did not mention the first, and for most members of the European Council the most important, matter discussed at that Council, which takes up a third of the Council’s conclusions: the plans for energy union. These will be extremely difficult and may well end up much less ambitious than the original Commission plans, but this is the real way to respond to an aggressive Kremlin. We need to reduce the perceived dependence on energy from Russia. Actually, we are not dependent on it; Russia is dependent on us. It needs to sell to us, and that need is greater than our need to buy from it. But in some member states, particularly Austria and Hungary, the pressure of the energy link is working perversely as regards the interests of the European Union and Ukraine, so I would say that one of the most important things to do is to press on with energy interconnection, both electricity and gas, and get as far as we can get, realistically, with an energy union.