EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, his committee and staff before on an excellent report. It should be read in conjunction with the excellent recent report on soft power from the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. The two link up rather well.

I rather take the view, as the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said, that we need to understand the Russian position, but I also strongly take the view that when you understand bad behaviour and its origins you do not justify it. The noble Lord made that point in a single line. It is very important. It is easy to look back on Russian history in the 20th century and see what a disastrous history it was: two world wars, famine, dictatorship, failed revolution, collapse into ignominy in the later part of the century. Russia is not a country you would have wanted to have been born into in the 20th century.

Just as that is true, the other side of the same coin is that you would not have wanted to have been born in one of the eastern European states that were occupied by the Soviet Union or, as those states saw it, by Russia. Indeed, I remember seeing groups of German troops in what was then East Germany, and a large group of armed Russian troops a few hundred yards down the road. That was common throughout, because those countries were held in occupation, and what they remember is not only the occupation but the failed revolutions, whether in Hungary or Czechoslovakia, and the brutality with which they were put down. They also remember, and this is particularly true of Ukraine, the mass famines and deportations that were driven both by the Nazis and by the Russian communists. In other words, there is an appalling history in this belt of countries that makes it easy to understand why they are behaving as they are.

As I say, understanding behaviour is not the same thing as condoning it, so it is also important to recognise that this is an incredibly difficult area for the world to address and one that in my view, as I have said before in the House, is profoundly dangerous precisely because it is difficult to predict how it is going to develop. Several people have said that they think that Mr Putin is a skilled strategist. I do not think he is, but he is extremely good on tactics. I am deeply worried. In what I thought was a rather perceptive speech, the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, hinted that the problem of Russia under Putin is that there is not really a strategy that in the long run will be beneficial either to Russia or to the other countries in the region. It is a profoundly dangerous strategy, because at the very least it will blow up into a major conflict in one area or another.

One of the problems driving Russia at the moment, and to which many speakers have referred, is that of nationalism. Mr Putin is a strong nationalist. The problem with nationalism is that if you use your Russian populations in the border areas, as has been done in Ukraine, you cannot necessarily control them. The noble Baroness on the Front Bench who is to respond to the debate for the Government will know that I was saying some years ago that there could be no peace settlement in Syria because Putin would not allow it until Assad was winning. That has turned out to be true. It is true not because there is necessarily some wickedness in Putin, but because he believes that all this is about the loss of Russian world power and Russian nationalism, which are so important to him. That very nationalism is dangerous. It is also out of kilter with what is happening in the rest of the world.

One thing which the report brings out so well, and which is probably the central message that I would like to re-emphasise, is that the European Union does not have a clear strategy for how to deal with this. In fact, what troubles me, and as the report indicates, there are divisions growing within Europe. People have mentioned Hungary, but I am not sure what is going to happen with Greece at the moment—something that has been mentioned outside this House. One can see that there is the danger of a certain fragmentation of a coherent policy within the European Union, and it is obviously in Mr Putin’s interests to play on that. He would like to see greater disintegration, if you like, within the European Union and NATO.

That raises the question: how can we in the European Union make sure that we have a common policy towards Russia? When people say to me, “Oh, at the end of that road there is a common foreign policy and a common defence policy, and that will lead to a European nation state”, perhaps the first thing I would say is that history tends to indicate that a severe external threat often creates a united state in some form. Indeed, we need only look back to the origins of the United Kingdom to see how we created a nation state out of four separate nations in large part because of threats from outside of what were then religious wars. We do not have to go down the road of a common European foreign and defence policy, but my goodness we really do have to have a clear strategy towards what Mr Putin is doing in Russia.

This is not just about the issues in Ukraine; there are issues along several of the boundary areas. It is also about the corruption in Russia. It is about the fact that polonium-210 can be transported from a nuclear reactor somewhere in Russia across to Moscow and then to London, be used to poison a person, and go back again with no action taken by that Government. It is the whole issue of the Russian policy of trying to push at boundaries in a way that is destabilising not just for Europe but for the rest of the world. That is one of the reasons why I rather like the recommendation made in paragraph 282 that we should organise an international conference to help Ukraine not only on economic regeneration but on dealing with the corruption that is inherent within Ukraine itself, because that has been part of the problem. We need to do that not just in the European context but externally. I really do not believe that some of the other emerging great powers—India, China, South Africa, Brazil—think that it is a good idea to have a major power changing borders by force. They certainly do not think that it is a good idea to get a power to give up its nuclear weapons, as Ukraine did in 1994, and then start dismembering that country. What does that do for nuclear disarmament anywhere? It is a profoundly serious problem.

I have great respect for the Russians, but a danger pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, with regard to sanctions is that one of the things that drives Putin is his belief that the West is decadent, whereas Russia can suffer bravely and with courage. That is what sanctions do. I do not have an alternative and I think that we have to impose sanctions—I strongly support them at the moment—but we need to recognise how intensely serious this issue is.

To my mind, the problem of how we deal with Mr Putin’s Russia is a greater threat to world peace than what is happening in the Middle East. The Middle East is actually containable; Russia is not containable, and at best this situation has the makings of a new Cold War drifting into the future. It is not easy, but I will say this to the noble Baroness who is going to respond for the Government: please can we start doing all we can within the European Union to get a clear and coherent strategy on our foreign policy reaction to Russia and to the dangers in the border areas? There are answers; they are far too complex to deal with in my final minute, but they are there and they need to be developed in full.