Ukraine

Lord Spicer Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

My Lords, I imagine the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, is not a relation of the sergeant who got back at the end of the charge of the Light Brigade and asked his commanding officer, “Same again, Sir?”.

I shall be very brief. The West’s response to the outrageous annexation of Crimea by Russia has been twofold. The first has been to suggest—in fact now, to implement—some punishments, including the removal of trade in certain goods and today we have had mention of the closing down of some negotiations that have been going on on military matters between the West and the former Soviet Union. Secondly, there has been the call for more negotiations. I shall spend a bit of time on the negotiations point without further ado.

However, I want to mention one anecdote about the punishments. I was in Saint Petersburg two or three months ago, and I bumped into a British admiral who was rather irate, which admirals are allowed to be. I discovered why he was irate. He was the commander of the NATO naval force and was there with other NATO officers to negotiate a deal on British and NATO help with saving submarines, because the Russians had that disaster a few years before and we have the technology to help with saving submarines. On his arrival that day, he had been called by, I think, Putin’s office, but certainly by a very high person in the Russian Government, to say that the meeting was off. I am not quite sure who was punishing whom at that point because it was Putin’s office that closed down that negotiation. I pass that on as an anecdote.

On negotiations, clearly it is true that jaw-jaw is better than war-war, but what the noble Lord, Lord Solely, said is also true: unless it is done very sensitively and astutely, it could simply open up a Pandora’s box of further Russian activity. It is true that one does not have to believe in “peace in our time” to know that negotiations can be dangerous. If one is always on the back foot in negotiations and is always responding to the other side in a negative way, it can look defeatist and send wrong signals to rogue states, such as North Korea, Iran and so on. So there is a problem here.

I shall suggest one way in which we can overcome these problems and the difficulties we have in negotiations. Clearly, if we are going to negotiate, we want to do it properly. There are two principles in negotiation that need to be stuck with. The first is that we must be realistic. We have to accept that certain countries are within the Russian sphere of influence, and Ukraine is one of those countries. It is a buffer between the West and the East. We cannot describe it any other way. It is a divided country, and Crimea, as has already been said in this debate, has on the whole been part of Russia. These are facts of life that we have to accept in any negotiations. We have to be realistic.

The second, and much the most important, point is that we have to be on the front foot in these negotiations. We cannot just respond to other people’s actions and proposals; we have to have our own proposals. This is extremely important, because otherwise we will always be on the back foot and will be defeatist and retreating backwards from other people’s propositions.

One of the really interesting things about the debate so far is that a number of proposals have come forward. There is my noble friend Lord Howell’s proposal for a democratic and stable Government in Kiev. There is another proposal for trying to get some stability in Crimea. My own view, for what it is worth, is that we will have to have a much more devolved Ukraine. I cannot see how the present Ukraine can carry on in a stable way. It has got to be more devolved and possibly even split. The West is going to have to take a view about this. It will be terribly important for those Governments to have a view in order to sit down and negotiate. We cannot just go in hoping for something to come out of the negotiations and retreat backwards the whole time in the way that has largely been the case up to now.

I say strongly to our Front Bench that it must work out what we want out of these negotiations. There have been all sorts of suggestions coming out of this debate, which has been very fruitful. I hope that the Government will start taking up some of these views and coming forward with their own propositions in these negotiations so that we are not on the back foot, looking defeatist and having the kind of repercussions that the noble Lord, Lord Solely, wisely warned the House could come about.