Russia

Lord Owen Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Owen (Ind SD)]

My Lords, I have been involved in business in Russia since 1995—mainly with a steel firm in Stary Oskol, some 600 kilometres south of Moscow—because I believed then and believe now that through business relations we will best establish good relations between the United Kingdom and Russia. I have also been a very strong believer in the Budapest memorandum, which relates to the subject of this debate, feeling it absolutely essential that countries which give up nuclear weapons should be strongly supported and feel that they have some form of military guarantee. It is of course nowhere near as strong as an Article 5 NATO agreement. I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said just now: it is a great mistake to expand NATO to either Georgia or Ukraine. We were advised about this many years ago by George Kennan; he was completely correct.

Although I disapproved of the way that the former President of the Ukraine was removed from power, I strongly condemned the annexation of Crimea. It might be possible—I said so publicly very soon after it happened—for an eventual agreement, on the lines of the Cuba-US agreement, between Ukraine and Russia over the military base of Sebastopol. I still think that that is one of the routes through. There has to be a resolution between those two countries about Crimea. The world cannot accept that annexation without there being a negotiated settlement between President Putin and President Poroshenko. They are meeting, probably as we speak, in Milan and there is a real possibility of concluding a serious negotiation.

There has been progress made over gas supplies, which is the first essential. The second essential is to get a real ceasefire, which has not yet materialised. The third essential is devolution to east Ukraine. It will never be content without some serious measures of devolution. It is something which we in this country ought not to be standing in the way of but encouraging. The fourth element is getting back into the international community on things like international air conventions. It is still a terrible tragedy that we have not achieved that resolution in the light of those appalling casualties from the shooting down of the Malaysian plane, and we need to know the full facts of that.

However, the essential issue seems to be that the people of Ukraine and the people of Russia have to understand that a peace negotiation and continued and increasing business relations are in both countries’ interests. It is very hard to see Ukraine, with all the financial difficulties that it has had and its considerable and long record of corruption, achieving the economic growth and prosperity that it deserves without co-operation, first, heading towards membership of the European Union, and secondly, retaining good, strong working relations with the Russian Federation. There is no escape from that, and some of the language that we have heard in the past few months, seeming to think that a solid division between Ukraine and Russia is in the interests of Europe, let alone the world, is a great mistake. We need to say that constantly to our Ukrainian friends on this issue. I have always supported the decision by Boris Yeltsin and President Kravchuk to separate out the Russian Federation and Ukraine, but no one could believe that this could be done without full cognisance of the history of those two countries at every stage. Sometimes in our debates we seem to have been blind to that factor.

So I think that a negotiation can be achieved between these two countries. They may make agreements that we in the West would not necessarily make—for example, there is another border dispute involving Russia, and that lies between Moldavia and the Ukrainian frontier. This is an area ripe for negotiation and solution, and might be one of the ways of easing the problem for the Ukrainians of the loss of Crimea. It is in this pragmatic way that I would like to see negotiations.

I say this to the Government: only four countries are signatories to the Budapest memorandum: the Russian Federation, Ukraine, the United States and Great Britain. Quite frankly, we ought to have been involved in the negotiations right from the start. When the crisis blew up on the streets of Ukraine and the President was in the process of being toppled, an EU initiative was taken, with three Foreign Ministers—German, French and Polish—going in and negotiating on our behalf. The Russians were there with an observer, after strong pleas from President Obama. They made an agreement. While the ink was still not dry, that agreement was broken, which did terrible harm to relations. We have to find a better way of dealing diplomatically with the Ukraine and Russia problem.