Ukraine

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, the State Duma in Moscow has just cancelled a delegation from our All-Party Parliamentary Russia Group a month from now. It so happens that I chaired the previous meeting here. Before we started the agenda, the formidable lady chair of the Duma asked me point blank, “Do you think we are a European country?”. I thought for a second and said, “Well, of course: Chekov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Shostakovich, Stravinsky”—you know, just to show how cultured I was. However, I wondered whether I should add, “Actually, no, you are not. Why are all eight of you from the United Russia party? You are not a normal European country, because we have multi-party democracy”.

The schizophrenia in Russia is very general. Putin himself wants to be acknowledged on the world stage, such as at the G8—the Olympics is an example par excellence—and not to be a pariah. There are multi- national economic facts of life—energy, whatever—and the huge role of shipping across the northern sea route from the Far East to Europe, et cetera. That internationalism is in sharp antithesis to the other half of his brain, which is demotic nationalism.

We have to try. Somebody mentioned having regard to people’s sensitivities. That is a very wise thing to say. A number of the points of the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, have great validity. Some other key points and perspectives had certainly not been made until the debate got under way. It is time to try to be constructive, as many people have said; it might sound facile. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, asked, “Why not have guarantees for the Russian minority as part of the solution?”. Yes, but we both made mistakes, did we not? It was only recently that the new Government did exactly the opposite on the question, which was highly provocative.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, that this is not the time that Russia should be thrown out of the OSCE. The Secretary-General of the United Nations could not chair a meeting at the moment because he is defending the territorial integrity of member states. However, that is highly nuanced in the case of Crimea, and I will add my two pennies on that.

I very much agreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie—I am sorry if I pronounce her name wrong. Yesterday’s proposals by the Russian Foreign Minister were rejected out of hand on the grounds that we would absolutely never accept the idea that Crimea could be either independent or part of Russia, because it must be part of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

I also very much agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, who made an excellent speech. I will qualify two points from my understanding of it. I very much agreed when he said, “Never use the word ‘never’”, but I will pick up the question of elections. I have now raised three times in the House the unsustainability of the constitution of Ukraine, which it has had for a long time. It is 50:50, a bit like the two sides in Northern Ireland, which I have mentioned. In that situation you cannot have elections in which the winner takes it all—51:49—and you certainly do not then arrest and imprison the leader of the Opposition on charges of treason. We do not want later this month—is it in May?—those sort of elections. The cart is being put before the horse as regards constitution-making.

On the talks in Northern Ireland, I am not saying that Dublin equals Moscow or anything but religion defines the situation. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans spoke about the two types of Orthodox in the east and the west. We can also look at a bit of history. Many noble Lords have mentioned history, but I will add one point. Churchill agreed with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta—aptly enough—in 1945 that the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian SSRs would become members of the United Nations, but that was rather illusory until after Gorbachev, perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. However, what was done in Yalta was to shift Poland to the west, to the Oder-Neisse line, and to shift Ukraine’s western border to the left-hand side—to the west—which has created the exact balance which we now inherit. Galicia—which also had a Roman Catholic element, going back to the Austro-Hungarian empire—became part of Ukraine because of the shift after Yalta in 1945. We therefore have a country which I will not say is slightly artificial, as that would be a very bad thing to say. However, in historical terms, as we have historical memories, it is a relatively recent country. Perhaps that is why people are all so hypersensitive.

Crimea is in a very special position. I remember hiring a car not so long ago in Simferopol, staying in Yalta and going to Balaklava. I got to the esplanade in the middle of Sevastopol and got in a launch. I paid someone some roubles and he showed me around the Russian Black Sea fleet. Only 50 yards away is the Ukrainian Black Sea fleet. You see monuments all around for all the wars that Russia fought—three major ones in defence of Sevastopol. Tolstoy was wounded there, and much of War and Peace, in terms of what it is like to fight, is from Sevastopol in 1855. That novel is based on Sevastopol in that sense; it is almost learnt by heart, although that might be difficult, by every Russian schoolchild. The heroic defence happened not only in the 19th and early 20th century but as recently as 1941 and 1942.

In the centre of Sevastopol by the esplanade is an administrative building with a Russian flag on top of it. That has been true for a long time. As I understand it, the deal implicitly is in the treaty to have the sovereign bases, just as we have in Cyprus—that is, the naval bases in Sevastopol. But that treaty runs out in 2018, and I think that Putin has that in mind. All the Ukrainians whom we met in Kiev said, “Of course they’ll have to hand them back to Ukrainian control—we’re not going to renew that treaty”. Well, I do not need to teach anyone to suck eggs about the problem of access through the Dardanelles. Of course, Russia could build another base further along to the east, but I think that it is very committed to Sevastopol, almost as much as to the memory of Stalingrad in recent times.

Finally, I echo what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans said, that the Greek Orthodox missionaries first landed in Sevastopol—I think that I am picking up the point correctly—and, incidentally, brought the Cyrillic alphabet. Anyone who goes to Athens and gets the hang of the Cyrillic alphabet does not have too much problem trying to understand the road signs in Crimea, and it is true of the whole of the ex-USSR; everyone understands Cyrillic. So this history is terribly important.

What we have to do now is to put a lot of eggs in the basket of how a new constitution would actually work. We have to find a form of words that does not say “Never” about Ukraine but tries to acknowledge that there have been mistakes on both sides—and I have mentioned a couple of them. We have to find a constitutional formula where there is buy-in from both main parties in the ethnic or religious sense. I do not dissent from everything that the Government and the West are doing at the moment, but my instinctive reaction, for what it is worth—and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s comment on this—is that we have to do what we can to give Putin an excuse not to do something stupid in the Donbas.

We must not be too provocative. Although people may be killed in a very tragic situation—take my analogy with Northern Ireland—it does not change what you then try to do. We must recognise the rights of the two sides to be part of a united Ukraine, even with a question mark over Crimea, and ensure that Russia comes to the table. I think that Putin is now looking for that. I may be wrong but that is my instinct.

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[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister had to leave for a few minutes and just spoke to me. Even in her absence, I want to pay tribute to her opening speech, which was extremely helpful and certainly laid down the approach that the Government are understandably taking.

Many other noble Lords in this debate have pointed out that what the President of Russia is doing is at worst illegal but certainly running roughshod over the wishes of people and the security and stability of the wider region. I would not add very much to the debate if I simply repeated those kinds of sentiments. Instead, I will take a different approach but I want to make very clear in doing so that, while I seek to understand some of the mistakes that we have made in the West and some of the understandings that Mr Putin and his colleagues have in the East, I do it not in any sense to excuse what he is doing but because, if we do not understand it a little better, we may continue to make even worse misjudgments than we have done to date. I rather suspect that some noble Lords will find some of the things I say uncomfortable and maybe even disagreeable, including colleagues on my own Benches.

First, it is extremely important for us to be clear about the difference between tactics and strategy. We are debating the question of Ukraine and the particular situation with Crimea. This is about a tactic of Mr Putin’s, not a strategy. The strategy is a wider issue. I have not heard much being said—except perhaps by the noble Lord, Lord Soley—about the wider approach that Mr Putin is taking and what drives him. I will come back to that in a minute.

On the tactical question of Ukraine and Crimea, we need to be very honest with ourselves. For example, when noble Lords say that it is for the people of Ukraine to decide their future democratically, it is manifestly clear that the people of Ukraine are not of one mind. The problem is that they are absolutely split down the middle, so democracy as we talk about it simply will not work. That is part of the reason we have this problem. It is not going to work, so let us not use phrases like that, which might be very reassuring in this Chamber but are meaningless in the real world outside. One of my noble friends talked about how important it is to be responsible in this Chamber because things that are said here might do damage outside. There might be some element of truth there but, frankly, I do not think many people in Russia listen to this Chamber. It has very little relevance to most of them and the way they see things. The influence it has is modest in our own country and even more modest more widely.

I heard a lot said—very sensibly, rationally and thoughtfully—about the economic issues and the energy drivers. Those are not the things that drive people in situations of conflict—otherwise we would never get into wars. In wars, everybody loses: economically, socially and in every other way. Wars do not come about because of some kind of weighing up of the calculus of economic benefit. When I listened to a number of things said about energy, trade and economic sanctions, my first thought was that that will not make any difference to Mr Putin and his colleagues because they do not make judgments on that basis. They make judgments on the basis that they believe that their great country has been humiliated and set aside by the West for a long period and they are trying—successfully —to fight back against that. That is the driver, not the economy.

The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, was, as always, excellent. One thing that he pointed out was the interconnectedness of everything. He has often rightly drawn our attention to that. That makes it very difficult to make economic sanctions work, because there are always ways around them, especially if you have an enormous country and other countries, including other members of the Security Council, prepared to play ball with you.

Let us look at the attitude of Mr Putin. It is always important to know your enemy to understand what you are dealing with. When we talk about the war in Afghanistan, we think about our intervention when we were there—at least, the most recent one. Russians think of the previous Afghanistan war, the one in which we backed the mujaheddin, sending huge amounts of weapons and materiel—and backing Osama bin Laden, of course—in order to get them out, one of the last great humiliations at the end of the Cold War. I may be wrong, but I perceive that Mr Putin is riding on the back of a nationalist tiger and saying, “We’re going to put this right in various places”. I could see it in the quartet dealing with the Israel-Palestinian problem when, for all the loud talk coming from the UN, the EU and the United States about who would talk to whom, Russia was happily talking to Hamas and Hezbollah all the way through. They just ignored what the other three said.

When we came to Syria, particularly after the intervention in Libya, it was absolutely clear from the beginning that Mr Putin was saying, “This is my red line. And, by the way, I am going to stick with mine. Now let us see what you do with yours”. What did we do? We drew lines in the sand, which is very convenient because you can always draw more lines in the sand and rub the other one out with your foot. The same mistake has been made with regard to Crimea: saying that this or that will never happen. I do not think it will be much reassurance to say that we stuck to our view in regard to the Baltic states and, three generations later, they got their freedom. That will not be much reassurance either to people in the Baltics now or to anyone else who might reasonably be fearful. Why? Because now we do not make much of a difference.

I come to the European Union. I am a strong supporter of the European Union, but I remember many arguments with some of my Liberal colleagues over the question of widening or deepening the Union. In my view, you could either deepen it and make it a real political Union—at that stage, I was very keen to do that and have a Europe of the regions rather than a Europe of nation states, and I still think that it may well have been possible—or you could widen it and make it in effect a glorified free trade area. My belief was that if you tried to do both, you would make for disaster, and I think that that is what has happened. We will not talk about the economic aspects of it, but the political aspects are that we have allowed the further widening of the European Union and encouraged others to join it because we saw it as a democratisation of the east and of the south of Europe and beyond, but at the same time many of us who supported that were talking about the importance of developing a foreign and security policy and a defence posture. How on earth could that have been seen by Russia as anything other than bringing forward military, foreign and security policy closer and closer to its borders? Was it ever going to be accepted?

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but if you take the case of Serbia and Kosovo—and it is true of many countries, surely—the Copenhagen criteria and other criteria, including the economic criteria for joining the EU, have been prized and highly sought after. That is not just skin deep; that is strategic—to use the noble Lord’s word—thinking. I ask the noble Lord to reflect on this idea that widening has had no real impact and not been a proper function of the European Union. I disagreed with Jacques Delors on this very point: I believe that widening and deepening have actually gone together.

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, that is precisely the problem which I am identifying. If we try to widen it out to states that Russia sees as being within its purview and at the same time insist that what we want is not merely a trading bloc but a political union with a common foreign and security policy, and with defence implications down the line, how could Russia see that other than as more than an economic free-trade and democratic area? It could only be perceived as a threat. We are reaping some of the problems of that approach.

We are at a dangerous place if we become more aggressive and at a dangerous place if we do not. I am reminded a little of the problem that I perceive in the policy that some of my noble friends on these Benches have espoused regarding nuclear weapons. The approach that is recommended by some says, “We won’t actually send out submarines with weapons on them unless there is a threat. We’ll keep them going out and end our continuous at-sea deterrence”. So if we find a situation now where these submarines are supposedly out and there is a threat—in a few months’ time there might be a greater threat, possibly on the Baltics or possibly somewhere else—at what point do we judge that the danger is sufficient to bring them back and put in the weapons? Is it now? Is it in a month’s time? Are we already too late? If you do that, would it not increase the militarisation of a problem that we already believe we should be de-escalating? We are in a serious problem and there is no easy answer to the dilemma that we are in.

However, I am persuaded that we need to look seriously at our strategic defence posture. I do not believe that what we have at the moment, which was largely defined on budgetary issues after the last election, is serving the purpose of seriously understanding how we deal with the chaos in the wider Middle East, across the north of Africa and below it and, increasingly, in eastern Europe. These are questions which this Chamber needs to come back and explore fully and thoughtfully because they are strategic threats, which we can ignore until the time when they come back to haunt us. Some of our friends, brothers and sisters closer to Russia, are already finding the past coming back to haunt them.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

There is considerable evidence that a large number of Russian troops have arrived in Crimea in the past two to three weeks. My clear understanding is that it is not within the agreement. If I am wrong, I will write to the noble Lord. As a matter of interest, a number of troops, including troops from within the North Caucasus, were engaged in—one might put it gently—holding down Chechnya. We recognise that Russia’s rational interests lie in a prosperous and stable Ukraine, as a number of noble Lords have said. We also recognise that international politics is not entirely rational. The First World War would not have broken out if international politics had been entirely rational.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that of course the UK will do everything possible to maintain a constructive dialogue but it has to be a dialogue in which both sides listen and search for agreement on shared principles. We cannot accept that Russia has one set of principles but expects us to observe another. The noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, talked of stand-up arguments with Duma deputies. A lot of us have had that. I seem to remember having such an argument when I was leading a delegation that included the noble Lord, Lord Howell. I rather enjoyed the exchanges.

We have to tell the truth to our Russian partners and recognise that those within the elite demand the rest of the world to accept the special character of the Russian state, which we are not prepared to accept. Russian suggestions that we should move towards a federal and loose Ukraine while maintaining a centralised and authoritarian Russia are a good example of how proposals are being made that would be irrational to accept, but it is attempting to impose them.

It is deeply regretful that the current Russian regime appears to need weak and divided neighbours in order to feel secure. One worry is that a weak Crimea will join an occupied South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria and others as a means of weakening the states around Russia.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am sure that the Minister is not misrepresenting the Russian position. However, equally, many of us have argued that no matter whether it is federal, devo-max or so on, you cannot go on with a unitary state with the sort of election results of 51% and 49%—and then winner takes all and you have arrested the leader of the Opposition. That is why I mentioned Northern Ireland. There is a caricature going on here.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

There are all sorts of questions in the noble Lord's remarks and I could respond in a number of ways, but at this time of night I hesitate to do that.

The noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, suggested that we might have a sort of sale and lease back with the Russians. The Ukrainian constitution makes it clear that any alteration of the territory of Ukraine must be resolved by an all-Ukrainian referendum. Article 134 of the constitution sets out that the autonomous Republic of Crimea is an integral constituent part of Ukraine and can only resolve issues related to the authority within the provisions set out by the Ukrainian constitution.

One could have negotiated this. The Government consider the referendum in Crimea to be illegal because it has been rushed through under the presence of a large number of Russian troops without updating the inaccuracy of the electoral register, with OSCE observers being refused entry. It is therefore not in any way acceptable to international standards.

The UN Security Council resolution was clear and strong on all of this. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that of course there is a role for the UN Secretary-General and the UN. The Chinese abstention was a silent acknowledgement that some fundamental principles of international law and international sovereignty are at stake in this crisis.

A number of noble Lords suggested that we have to include Russia in all future discussions with Ukraine. Of course we do. We still make every effort we can to maintain a dialogue with Russia. We continue to urge Russia not to take any further action towards annexation of Ukraine. The UK remains supportive of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and it is now likely that the political and foreign policy aspects of the association agreement will be signed at the meeting of the European Council this week.