Ukraine

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Friday 31st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, it is good that we are having this debate, and I hope that we have similar debates quite regularly. We all look forward to the maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Barrow, who brings special expertise and knowledge to our considerations today.

Anyone who still holds doubts about the kind of threat that the West faces need only look at the pictures from just a few weeks ago of the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Beijing. The sight of President Xi, President Putin and President Kim Jong Un watching the robotic military parade in Tiananmen Square should have sent a shiver down the back of all western leaders. Those leaders that day were not on holiday or on some weekend break in China’s capital; they had been there with Prime Minister Modi the previous day and, remotely, with the mullahs in Tehran. They were there mobilising for a world order that reduces the power and the values of the West. The Shanghai group was assembled at that time to show support for Putin’s assault on Ukraine and as a signal that traditional foes were now demonstrably united and conspiring against us.

The stakes in eastern Ukraine, as has already been said, are high, and they go well beyond the geography of the Donbass. If the invasion of a sovereign state such as Ukraine is successful, then make no mistake about the consequences for us and for our way of life. The Ukrainians are fighting tenaciously and resolutely for their lives and their land, but they are fighting and dying for us too, because the inviolability of existing borders is part of the post-Second World War settlement and, if it unravels, we will pay a huge price in the cascade of disruption that will follow.

Today in the grey zone, Putin deploys cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns and election interference. Sabotage has been contracted out to organised criminals, attacks across Europe are systematic and our critical national infrastructure is on a knife edge. The Kremlin strategists intimately know all our vulnerabilities. Undersea cables carry 98% of all the data that we use, and 77% of all the gas supplies to this country come in one pipeline from Norway. Homeland defence was a key aspect of the Government’s strategic defence review. UK national resilience has to be as serious a priority as it is in Scandinavia.

A few weeks ago, Mr Martin Jaeger, the president of Germany’s federal intelligence agency, addressed the Bundestag, and his words should chill us. He talked about a looming “hot confrontation” with Russia, and he said: “Our enemy never rests and we are already under attack”. Moscow’s goal, he said, was “to undermine NATO, destabilise European democracies, and divide Western societies in order to drive them into self-destructive paralysis”. Those are wise and sobering words but, as the strategic defence review soberly says:

“Defence’s wider ways of working remain suited to a peacetime era”.


But we no longer live in a peacetime era, and, in contrast, our adversaries are in attack mode. Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the great master of strategy, wisely said that

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

The lesson from that is that we need to impress on the architect of this terrible invasion that he simply cannot win, and that we will continue to provide Ukraine with the means to get it into Putin’s mind that pursuing this war cannot and will not achieve his deluded dreams of the total subjugation of Ukraine.

Under Putin’s leadership, Russia, a land of basically good and decent people, has lost or had maimed a million and a half young Russians, the seed corn of that country’s future. At least 300,000 have died on Putin’s chosen battlefield, and another half million have left the country to escape his authoritarian claws. His economy is overheating, and this year he managed to capture only 0.4% of Ukrainian territory. He is failing, and he is failing Russia. We must not grasp defeat out of the jaws of victory.