Ukraine

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Thursday 21st September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Government and the Minister for providing this debate. It has been a long time coming, but it is welcome none the less, and I congratulate her on the strong statement she has made this morning, and my noble friend, Lady Smith, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, on their powerful speeches. It is right that a conflict such as this, which we are involved in, should be debated regularly in this House and Parliament.

If we, as a country, had been invaded by Russia, or indeed by any other country, we would be discussing it every day. If it was our Armed Forces battling for national survival, we would be bending every sinew to throw out the invader. We would have factories turning out ammunition, using every single weapon at our disposal, rallying every part of society, just in the same way that the Ukrainians are doing just now. We would make the sacrifices, pay the price, mobilise our people—all our strengths and all our military might. We have done it before, and we would do it again. We would defend our land, our territorial integrity, our borders, our people, and we would do it with tenacity and with national unity. It almost goes without saying. But we need, of course, to remember this: the Ukrainians are not simply fighting for themselves alone. They are fighting for us as well.

The aggression of Russia, and the gross violation of the United Nations charter, as the Deputy Prime Minister of this country said at the United Nations today, by a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council itself, is a threat to our way of life as well, and to our values, our right to live in a world of safety and security, and our territorial integrity. That is why we stand with the people of Ukraine and why we need to do much more, in our own interests as well as theirs.

Maybe on occasion we have lost sight of the stakes that are involved in this conflict. They are mighty. If Putin wins and destroys Ukraine, and makes even part of that country a colony of the Russian Federation, we lose as well. Why is that? First, the new rules of the world would be rewritten by the authoritarians— the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans and the Iranians. That would assuredly make for a very dark and uncomfortable world to live in. Secondly, as we know, Putin would not stop at Ukraine. Moldova, Kazakhstan and Armenia—which is already under attack, as we speak—would all feel the cold wind of an enervated Russian Federation and elite. A world where borders can be changed by military means at the whim of a single paranoid authoritarian would be a very chaotic world indeed.

It is true, of course, and worth putting on the positive side of this terrible calamity, that Putin grossly underestimated the unity of the western Europeans, whom he thought were fragmented and weak-willed. He saw some evidence of that in our weak response to the invasion of Crimea and in the shambolic exit from Afghanistan, but he then underestimated the link between the United States and Europe, which has been welded firm. He underestimated the attractions of NATO, with Finland newly in and Sweden on the brink of membership. His fictional so-called threat has multiplied. More than anything, he seriously underestimated the tenacity, grit, spirit and sheer determination of his fellow Slavs in Ukraine to defend and repel the naked aggression of their neighbouring state.

At the same time, we should not underestimate Vladimir Putin or the small group around him who tell him what he wants to hear. We should not underestimate his capacity for limitless cruelty against the Ukrainians, given the dreadful war crimes already committed, as outlined by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and the forced abduction of children—for which the admirable International Criminal Court has now indicted him. We should not underestimate the pain that he is willing to inflict on his own people to pursue his grim vanity project, or his willingness to bear the huge, long-term damage to the Russian economy of an unnecessary war and the serious effects that sanctions are having on that economy. Hundreds and thousands of the young—the brightest and best of Russia—have left the country; it is a country weakened as a consequence.

We should not underestimate Vladimir Putin’s willingness to subordinate Russia to the Chinese and now, bizarrely, the North Koreans, as he takes risks such as opening the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic to soft-skinned tankers of oil, as he has done in recent days. We must not underestimate the enormous propaganda exercise that is being undertaken by the Kremlin, which uses disinformation, espionage, RT television, Sputnik radio and YouTube channels, all designed to undermine western support and encourage the global South countries to bend to it. It is already having an effect on European opinion. According to a recent opinion poll, up to 70% of Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians think that providing weapons to Ukraine provokes Russia and drags their own countries closer to the war.

We should not underestimate the efforts that Putin is making to win this conflict, dodging sanctions and smuggling in the components to create accurate missiles. I am told that Russia is producing 200 tanks and 2 million artillery shells a year—twice as many as it was producing before the conflict. Apparently, that exceeds western production by a factor of seven. Russian artillery shells cost $600 a piece, compared with $5,000 in the West—a lesson that we need to take on board. We should not underestimate his capacity for evil, because short of using nuclear weapons, which I think is unthinkable even for him, that capacity for evil may be boundless.

It was one man who took the decision to invade, and it will take one man to decide that enough is enough. One might seriously ask whether that is possible? It is a fair question, but we should always remember that, in 1989, when the Soviet Union decided that it was not winning in Afghanistan and that it was costing it lives and money, it simply folded its tents and came home. There were no off-ramps and no face-savers; it simply came home. Only a few weeks ago, President Xi Jinping of China ended his draconian lockdown without giving any notice to the population. At the same time, the Supreme Leader of Iran released thousands of women prisoners from jail. In both cases, the authoritarians could see that the ground was moving under them. Personal survival matters to them much more than saving face.

That is why it is imperative that Vladimir Putin gets the same message. He will get it by the West standing firm and resolute, with western leaders regularly and loudly telling their people what is at stake and why sacrifices are in their own personal interests and in our nation’s interest. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has said, it is therefore crucial that we supply the Ukrainians with all the weapons and ammunition that they need and when they need them. The delay in sending long-range missiles and artillery shells has hurt the counter-offensive, expectations for which were probably unrealistically high. With the Russians digging deep World War I-type trenches and sowing multi-level minefields, it was never going to be easy to recover the poisoned territory that they had taken. However, as we have seen in the past few days, it is not impossible, and progress is being made.

I say again that we need to guard against the fear and apprehension of escalation that we see in so many leaderships in Europe. Instead of the West being nervous of Russian escalation—something it has maxed-out already—we need to breed in the military hierarchy in Moscow the worry that, if they overdo what is being done in Ukraine, then an actual rather than a fictitious war with NATO might be the result; a war that they know they could only lose.

I saw a lot of the Russian military in my time, including being asked, after my time in NATO, to address the military chiefs club of the Russian Federation, an organisation of retired high-ranking officers. My impression was that they are very patriotic and conservative. The motherland is all important and, in the end, they are not prepared to risk it for a failing Putinesque adventure, especially one which has been so spectacularly unsuccessful, wasteful and humiliating.

The rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin showed the fraud of the war’s justification, which he called out, and the inner tensions in the authoritarian glasshouse. Only by ramping up our political pressure and maintaining targeting on Putin himself will the edifice crack and will the military, which has supported him until now, cavil at the damage that he is doing.

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the greatest strategist of the Second World War, once memorably said that

“the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men”.

It was a salutary reminder that more than Prigozhin have doubts about this war. They need, with our united front, to notify Vladimir Putin that, just as in Afghanistan, the time to go home is now. It is our solemn duty to stand with those who are fighting for us in Ukraine. I quote President Zelensky:

“Human morality must win this war”.


The Ukrainians need to win, they must win, they have to win and we must ensure that they do win.