Landmines and Cluster Munitions

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I should declare an interest as a senior fellow of Policy Exchange, which has produced very interesting material on all this; of course, the noble Lord, Lord Godson, is its director.

Thirty years ago, Diana, Princess of Wales, campaigned against landmines. I witnessed this because I was editing the Daily Telegraph and I sent our revered former editor Bill Deedes—Lord Deedes—to travel with her to Angola and, weeks before her tragic death, to Bosnia. He wrote beautifully about it, conveying to the world her passionate concern, which he, a holder of the Military Cross, shared. What made the Princess’s Halo Trust campaign possible were the propitious circumstances of the time. Peace seemed to have broken out, hence the Ottawa treaty of 1997.

However, that shared peace has gone and, sad to say, there is no prospect of its return. Our allies which have now withdrawn or given notice of withdrawal from Ottawa or Oslo are not heartless regimes. On the contrary, they directly confront the threat of a heartless regime, and Russia uses anti-personnel landmines, in particular, as a weapon of invasion, because it sows them in occupied Ukrainian territory and prevents reconquest, makes civilian life impossible and channels Ukrainian forces towards their death.

These allies are the countries which best understand the Russian threat, and they know they must be ready to respond in kind. I am disappointed that our Government seem to disapprove, or even to hesitate to withdraw themselves from Ottawa and Oslo. The Prime Minister rightly wants Britain to lead Europe in helping Ukraine against Russian aggression, but it is not really leadership if it primly tut, tuts when our smaller allies toughen up.

I was recently in Kyiv, and I went to see a factory there which was making robots. The robot carried two things: it carried Ukrainian landmines to plant, which would pass over minefields, and it carried a kamikaze landmine, which would blow up at the end of its mission. Surely those were necessary things to do, not things that should be prevented by adherence to a convention.