Ukraine

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Government for bringing this debate to the House and the Minister for his clear opening remarks, on which there is consensus across the House. He knows of the support of these Benches, which my noble friend Lady Smith indicated. I join others in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, to his place and look forward to the valuable contributions he will make as a Member of this House.

My noble friend said at the start that we are debating a war in Europe, but the conflict has global ramifications. We have just heard reference to the competing international fora of the Commonwealth of Nations and BRICS summits, with perhaps jarring narratives and, as some have said, competing political relevancies. BRICS has become political rather than a trading co-operative body because of Moscow. As I will return to in a moment, redoubling our efforts in that regard will be important.

We have supported the Government’s actions, most recently the £2.25 billion facility of interest. As my noble friend said, we had pressed the previous Government on this, and we are delighted to see action. I hope the Minister will give a bit more detail on what practical impact that will have and when because, as we know, the timing is imperative.

We on these Benches have been pleased to play our part in the cross-party consensus that it is in the UK’s interests for Ukraine to prevail in its defensive struggle. That is also in our wider interests for global development, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said. Last week, we discussed the SDGs in his debate, as well as the tensions in modern Ethiopia. Next week, we will have a debate on the wider Horn of Africa. Across all those areas, we see Russia’s malign work to destabilise, to misinform and to support terror activities from Yemen to Sudan and the Sahel. As the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, said, we see that closer to home in the western Balkans. The reach of the conflict, therefore, shows the 21st-century nature of hybrid warfare, with the many commercial interests that feed into it. As the Minister alluded to, this is both modern and medieval: in Ukraine, there is hand-to-hand combat in freezing mud trenches, while above in the skies there are drones controlled hundreds of kilometres away, with social media covering it instantly.

Support in the form of equipment and military materiel is vital, as the noble Lords, Lord Stevens and Lord Spellar, said. However, we need to do more with our allies on reconstruction in Ukraine, such as providing technical support for restarting air services at Lviv Airport, an area the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, spoke so movingly about. One of the ways we can show that Russia will fail is if the reconstruction following its damage occurs almost as quickly it happens. The resilience of the Ukrainian people must be the resilience of their economy and industry, and the UK can play an important part in that.

We also need to do more on having a greater impact on the Russian war economy. There are headwinds resulting from those willing to continue to trade with, and circumvent sanctions on, Russia. This is where my noble friend’s reference to the BRICS summit is of great importance: we need to deploy greater diplomatic activity with trading partners such as India and the UAE—the latter has not been mentioned in the debate, but it is part of the BRICS fora, alongside Iran—to exact pressure on Russia. We also need to be willing to review our trading preferences and liabilities. We are allies and friends, but we need to ensure that there is pressure on Russia. We also have our standards: if countries have trading preferences with us, they must be based on what we consider to be global norms.

We need to be cognisant that, with some justification, some see double standards in the UK and the West’s position on Ukraine compared to that on Gaza, in our funding of international development assistance, and in our funding for Ukrainians here in the UK but not for those in Sudan. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, all that may be true, but it is no justification for the aggression of Russia and the Putin regime.

Some—I am one of them—have seen the Russian chairing of BRICS as stretching credulity. In the official literature of the Kazan summit, the Russian Government are now trumpeting what they want to see as a development of interparliamentary relations and ties. This is a country with a travesty of a Parliament, systematically seeking to destroy the continuing functioning of a democratic Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv. It has no moral basis to argue that there should be parliamentary strengthening. The Commonwealth of Nations and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association need to have their support redoubled, especially when we debate this in our functioning Parliament. We should remind ourselves that Members of our Parliament, including some of those taking part in this debate, have been sanctioned by the Russian Government.

Another thread of the debate that I support strongly is working with our partners in the European Union. My noble friend Lady Smith and I spoke in a debate the week before last, calling for closer security co-operation with European allies. Ukraine shows how important that is. With the coming to an end of Hungary’s presidency of the EU, which is to be taken over by Poland, there is a good opportunity for the UK to take advantage of that—to have closer, structured, treaty-based security relationships, moving away from the blocking role played by Budapest.

Finally, something that has been touched on, but not fundamentally, is the human impact of this, primarily on younger people. If my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield were here, she would have raised the issue of the need for psychosocial support for children as a result of this conflict. This is often underreported, but I believe it is vital that we do more, and not only in this conflict. UNICEF has said that 2.2 million children in Ukraine are in need of psychosocial support but, in the Sudan conflict, 10 times as many as that, 20 million children, are out of school and are the principal victims of the conflict. In Gaza, 600,000 children are out of school, impacted by the conflict as the IDF has damaged or destroyed 90% of schools.

I have previously said in debates that, if the UK has an offer, the offer should be defending education in conflict and its quick restoration if there is some cessation of violence, because immediate trauma support when there is a cessation of conflict will be an investment that is in our interests for the future. Why is it vital? We know that, in this hybrid warfare environment, where misinformation and disinformation are militarised and used as a tool, they thrive when there is no education. A whole new generation of conflict-scarred children in our continent, in the Middle East and in Africa, terrifies me for the next generation.

Therefore, I am very pleased to be an ambassador for an organisation called Do Not Look Away, which is focusing on young people and violence. It published its first video just this week and it includes Yaryna, an 11 year-old Ukrainian artist whose work, as some noble Lords may recall, was put on the side of the Ariane 5 rocket and blasted into space. She and her family believe that Ukraine’s destiny is as part of the European continent, with safety. In the video, her mother said something that struck me. As a Ukrainian who left and sought refuge, she said that she did not want to be called a refugee, because it was not her fault or her desire to leave Ukraine. She said she was just a temporary traveller who wants to go home. We and our allies have provided shelter in a storm for many people, but we now know that our imperative is to make sure that there is a home for her and her family to return to. For the children affected by conflict, we need to play a much bigger role.