My Lords, I want this subject considered by your Lordships because although we have discussed Ukraine a fair amount, we have not given all that much attention to the existence of, and threat posed by, tactical nuclear weapons; that is, weapons of lower yield which can be fired from missiles with a shorter range than strategic weapons, as well as by other means.
By way of background and to avoid any possible misunderstandings, during the fierce debates of the 1980s I was, with much moral fear and spiritual trembling, a defender of the policy of nuclear deterrence. I am still convinced that, for the first time ever in human history, it is not in the interests of one power to go to war with another that possesses nuclear weapons. Although I opposed CND on many occasions in those days, I always felt that it performed a very useful function in keeping before all of us the terrible devastation that the use of such weapons would bring about.
During the 2019 Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir, my fears were first aroused that the world might be forgetting that fact. Recordings were made of generals involved in the fighting, in which they talked about the use of nuclear weapons as though they were hand grenades being lobbed about. It is important for all of us—our own public and, if possible, the Russian general public—to understand the power and effect of these weapons. They have not gone away. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were equivalent to 15 kilotons of explosive energy. Tactical nuclear weapons are available in a range of sizes—0.3, 1.5, 10 or 50 kilotons of explosive energy. Even 0.3 kilotons would cause all the horrors of Hiroshima, albeit on a smaller scale. It would cause a fireball, shockwaves, and deadly radiation that would cause long-term health damage in survivors. Radioactive fallout would continue in air, soil, water and the food supply. Ukrainians are of course already familiar with this kind of outcome because of the disastrous meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, on bringing forward this debate. It is the second time in a week or so that he has secured a debate on a vital international topic. He is doing the work of this House’s business managers for them by playing to the Lords’ strengths in this area. At a time when our colleagues in the other place seem to be sinking down the plughole of bickering and short-termism, it is the accumulated experience of their Lordships that can focus on the international issues which, in the end, are more decisive than any others in our daily lives and our long-term existence as a nation. So I hope the noble and right reverend Lord will take an accolade from me for making a better case than most for a future active and experienced House of Lords.
The potential use of tactical nuclear weapons is the most important issue of all because, of course, it would unlock grim escalation and proliferation, end the balance of nuclear deterrence entirely and lead us straight to a world war and mass incineration with the consequences the noble and right reverend Lord just described.
I do not believe, as some do, that there is a halfway house between small tactical nuclear weapons and the full force of massive destruction on a scale never seen before in human history. In the present fraught situation, it is China, rather than Russia, where the key lies to governing Putin’s actions. There is no doubt in my mind that until now, China has been the most powerful restraint on Putin and his warmongering generals. As he increasingly loses on the ground to Ukrainian resilience and ingenuity, Putin’s latest assurance, about a fortnight ago, was that he would not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine after all. Of course, that cannot be trusted; it is just one statement. It is interesting that he had to make it, because it should be seen entirely in the context of trying to keep China’s vague approval of what he is doing. In all the back-track exchanges with Russia since the Russian invasion, in addition to the official hotline, to which I have had the privilege of access, Putin’s toying with nuclear weapons has been China’s No. 1 concern. It has been quite ready to use its good offices with Moscow in exchange for specific restraints on American and NATO supply and the technological sophistication of weapons.
My Lords, I have supported military interventions in the Falklands, Iraq and central Europe, but on this conflict I have repeatedly expressed my concerns. I join the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, in some of the concerns he expressed.
In a dozen contributions since before the Russian invasion, I have argued against western military intervention and in favour of talks. At that time, Luhansk and Donetsk were provinces under Ukraine’s sovereignty. The Russians had deployed paramilitary groups, ostensibly to defend what they mistakenly argued were both majority Russian-speaking areas from Ukraine-sponsored Azov Battalion attacks. These battalions had a long history of questionable political affiliation and were an irritant in the administration of a wider Ukraine. I understand that, following reorganisation, they now fall under Ukrainian government control. That was the position when, earlier this year, the Americans again proposed NATO membership. That threat provoked Putin, and he has skilfully used it to reinforce and justify his delusional dreams of a greater Russia.
During the two speaking tours to Russia that I made in the 1990s, I was constantly reminded of both the Russian preoccupation with a perceived external threat and the associated loss of 25 million in the Second World War. It is always there in the background in talks with Russians. I understand that paranoia and Putin’s ability to exploit it. Our mistake in the West has been to feed it by supporting a breach of the Cold War compromise—the maintenance of a string of non-nuclear, barrier, buffer states from Finland in the north to Georgia in the south, placating Russian concerns.
We have now entered a war of indefinite duration characterised by appalling atrocities: rape, indiscriminate murder, nuclear threat, destruction of property now estimated at more than $350 billion and a winter siege threatening millions. In response we are sponsoring a proxy war over which we have ceded control, with ministerial statements offering indefinite equipment support. Russia’s predictable response has been a news lockdown in Russia, escalating troop deployments and a land grab.
My Lords, I welcome this more substantial debate on Ukraine and thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for securing it. Occasional Questions or short responses to government Statements do not really allow time to come properly to terms with what is happening in this war. Moreover, I sense that the understandable fascination with the military—including nuclear—aspects of the conflict does not really do justice to all its strategic complexity.
To a military mind, the conflict in Ukraine conforms to much of the thinking of the Government’s recent integrated review. In a tactical sense, the conflict has crossed the threshold of formalised warfare and is now quite clearly both brutal and horrific. However, for the moment, at least, it is a war that is limited by both geography and the means employed. Keeping it that way must be one of the primary aims of international policy.
The situation in Ukraine also represents the tactical military dimension of a wider strategic conflict between Russia and those elements of the international community that support an established set of rules and values. That strategic conflict is not geographically limited and embraces a wide variety of what we call “attack vectors”, including, though not limited to, cyber, energy, food, economic sanctions, misinformation, political assassination and proxy terrorism.
I will offer three observations. First, in a military sense, we cannot afford to either win or lose the tactical battle. To attempt to win risks the military escalation that we must seek to avoid, while to lose risks a strategic moral defeat. We must, however, do more to keep Ukraine in the fight, since I fear that Russia still maintains an advantage in the means of production to sustain industrial-level warfare.
Secondly, the more difficult conflict is the strategic one: the one of international resilience in the face of the non-kinetic dimensions of the confrontation. That is also one that I worry Putin might still think he can win—or at least create the circumstances for an advantageous peace.
My Lords, President Biden recently commented that this is the most dangerous threat of nuclear war since the Cuban crisis. But are we entering a period of heightened danger, or is this Putin’s way of signalling to the West that it is time to start negotiations? Since the beginning, Mr Putin has been playing poker. If he believes that the West will not back down, he will have to up the stakes. Putin once said, “We don’t need the world without Russia”.
Getting Ukraine is Putin’s obsession. He made that clear in his 2008 NATO speech and in his 6,000-word essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. For him, the Maidan Revolution was led by Nazi putschists on behalf of Washington. As a result, war became inevitable.
Since 2020, Russia has become a totalitarian regime. Power within the system depends on access to the President, and the number of those with access has narrowed to a handful of associates. These men, known as siloviki, have enriched themselves during the 22 years of Putin’s rule. They also believe that they are in an existential struggle against the West and that, if Putin goes, they lose everything. There is no chance they will back down now. The country could collapse at any moment, but there do not seem to be any cracks among his inner circle. His only critics are the hawks, like Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, or Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, who advocate for tougher measures to win the war.
More strikingly, Putin has managed to weaponise the population so that they do not take to the street as they did in Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus. Putin relies on Dugin’s ideas of a centuries-old conflict, with Russia bearing the divine role of preserving conservative values against the evil powers of the US and Britain, both of which have constantly sought to subdue Russia, from the great game to World War I, and to Vietnam and Afghanistan. This dogma was deployed on state-owned television and the media. With the population physically and ideologically exhausted, it has been easy to indoctrinate them, particularly the older generation.
My Lords, I too thank and commend the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for instituting this important debate and for introducing it so profoundly.
Regrettably, we are all familiar with Putin’s and his spokesperson’s habit of using diplomatic relations like a cracked mirror, ascribing his own egregious intentions to others and therefore justifying aggression and escalations. From the start of this phase of the Ukraine conflict, it has had a nuclear component. In his declaration announcing the February invasion, Putin made statements warning the NATO powers of likely nuclear consequences should they choose to intervene. This nuclear blackmail appears to have, in limited terms, succeeded. NATO rejected Ukraine’s pleas to institute a no-fly zone, despite the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Parliaments all voting in favour. It should not be possible for a tyrant to use nuclear weapons as a shield to conquer his neighbours like this; that it is points to one of several deep injustices and risks baked into the systems that we have created.
There is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. The use of any nuclear weapon would be strategic; all are appallingly destructive and present an existential risk. They are not merely political instruments or one of the sinews of diplomacy. The risk of nuclear weapons being used on a European battlefield is greater today than at any time since the height of the Cold War, and this risk is not just subject to the caprice of an increasingly unstable political actor who is acting against the backdrop of a decaying regime. It is also subject to error or miscalculation. In October 1962 off the coast of Cuba, a Soviet submarine commander, on hearing depth charges, wrongly inferred that war had broken out and gave orders to fire a nuclear weapon at US targets. He was prevented from so doing only by the last-minute intervention of the senior intelligence officer on board the boat. I and almost everyone I know owe our lives to this officer.
My Lords, we have heard a series of extremely thoughtful and well-considered speeches, which underlines the fact that we need a full day’s debate on Ukraine very early in the new year.
If your Lordships had any doubt about the terrible things that we are facing, please go across to Portcullis House, where, within the parliamentary precinct, there is the most extraordinarily shocking exhibition of war crimes, opened by the brave Madam Zelenska only two days ago. However doubting you might be, that will reinforce that we face something evil. This is why I am particularly glad that this debate was introduced by a profound Christian thinker, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, who has done so much for this country over so long.
We have to exploit modern contrivances—24-hour news and even social media, which I hate so much—to get across to the Russian people that they are not our enemy. Their enemy is their leader. We have to get across to them that they need fear nothing about their national security.
Both the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and my noble friend Lady Meyer referred to the last war. Anybody who has been to Russia and talks to Russians knows that that spectre of the 27 million dead, which helped to mould their national character, will not go away, and they need to feel security. But the security that they need cannot be provided by a megalomaniac dictator. Somehow, we have to get this across to them, and to get it across to a people who have no infrastructure of democracy. Apart from the brief experiment before the Bolshevik revolution, they have lived in an absolutist regime for centuries, and they are living under a tsar now.
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton of Richmond, was very wise when he talked about our being essentially careful as well as determined—careful because a nuclear conflagration has no winner, and everyone is a loser. Equally, if Ukraine is defeated, we have all lost, because we have lost something that is essentially precious to us.
4:37 pm
Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful, as we all are, to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for initiating this debate and for drawing attention to the real danger of nuclear escalation.
I am in profound disagreement with the Government’s policy on Ukraine—I have said it before in this House and I shall say it again. This disagreement can be stated in one sentence: the Government’s policy is a war policy; I support a peace policy. I shall try to justify that.
The then Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, stated on 27 April:
“We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”
This policy has been repeatedly restated by government spokesmen. It is supported by the Opposition and echoed by the media.
In calling for peace, I may be an isolated voice in Britain, but not in the world. Everyone outside the NATO world is calling for negotiations and some within it—I draw attention to President Macron in particular. Let me try to be logical. The Government’s policy makes sense on one assumption: that Ukraine, with NATO military support and economic sanctions on Russia, will soon complete the reconquest of Ukraine, including Crimea. In this case, there will be nothing to negotiate; the deed will have been done—it will have been accomplished.
I am not privy to secret military intelligence, but such evidence as I have, plus a dose of common sense, suggests that neither Russia nor Ukraine can achieve their war aims at the present level of hostilities, so the pursuit of victory is bound to bring escalation on both sides. Russia will intensify its air war, and NATO will provide Ukraine with more weapons to shoot down Russian aircraft. At what point such escalation leads to the accidental or deliberate deployment of tactical nuclear weapons is anyone’s guess, but the danger must be there, as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, pointed out. That is why the war should be ended as soon as possible, and that can be done only by negotiations based on a ceasefire.
I utterly reject the premise underlying the Government’s policy that it is up to Ukraine to decide if and when it wants to end the war. President Zelensky’s policy is to get his “land back entirely”. Of course, it is up to Ukraine to decide what to do, but we cannot give Ukraine carte blanche to determine its war policy when we are in fact providing it with the weaponry to continue the war at considerable sacrifice to our own people. The decisions for peace and war, and on what terms to end the war, must be taken by Ukraine and NATO jointly.
4:42 pm
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Russia possesses 2,000 of these tactical nuclear weapons, kept in storage facilities throughout the country. These have been developed to be used against troops and installations in a small area, or in a limited engagement. Such weapons can be launched on the same short-range missiles that Russia is currently using to bombard Ukraine, such as the Iskander ballistic missile, which has a range of 500 kilometres. These are not the only tactical weapons that could be deployed. The United States has about 100 nuclear gravity bombs—deployed with aircraft and therefore with less sophisticated guidance—stationed around Europe, and 130 or so elsewhere.
Many paradoxes are provided by the existence of nuclear weapons, particularly tactical nuclear weapons. In relation to Ukraine, it could be argued that if it was not for such weapons, we would already be involved in a third world war. Friendly countries would likely have wanted to intervene and defend a neighbour against blatant aggression, and it could all have gone from there. Therefore, in one sense, they have already acted as a deterrent. Although Ukraine is not a member of NATO, the presence of nuclear weapons has rightly made NATO even more cautious and it has not directly intervened. On the other hand, as has happened many times in recent decades, under the nuclear umbrella, a limited war can take place. Clearly, one reason why Mr Putin thought he could get away with a limited war in his backyard was that he calculated that his possession of nuclear weapons would prevent any thought of allies intervening in Ukraine and risking a third world war.
Then, there is the paradox of tactical nuclear weapons. The fact that they could be used in a relatively limited way makes their use more likely, so their presence and fear of escalation to the use of strategic weapons strengthens deterrence overall. On the other hand, for that very reason, they are more dangerous: their use could be envisaged.
The key fact surely is that the gap between the use of conventional weapons and nuclear weapons is a real threshold. It has been maintained for 77 years, providing a nuclear taboo, and it is essential that this be maintained. As President Biden has said:
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
President Putin, without actually mentioning the word “nuclear”, has already clearly threatened such weapons’ use through the belligerent language he has chosen. We know from his behaviour that his threats have to be taken seriously. On the other hand, expert analysis of possible scenarios for their use regards it as extremely unlikely, but again, as Lawrence Freedman puts it with his characteristic wisdom, he does not see the use of nuclear weapons
“as being a likely development, but we always … keep on coming back to President Putin’s state of mind, and his grasp of the situation that he’s put his country into, and how determined he would be to avoid”
the “humiliation” of defeat.
There is a continuing risk, which we must never forget: the risk of misunderstandings and a misreading of the situation in the fog of a crisis, as well as the risk of a deliberate and intended threat. In 1963, a direct link between the United States and the Kremlin was set up. I understand that this now takes the form of a secure computer link with encrypted emails. It has been used on a number of occasions: when John F Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963; during the outbreak of the Six Day War in 1967; during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War; during the Yom Kippur War of 1973; when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan; and several times during the Reagan Administration, with the Soviets asking questions about events in Lebanon and the United States commenting on the situation in Poland. As recently as October 2016, the hotline was used to reinforce Barack Obama’s September warning that the US would consider any interference on election day a grave matter.
I do not know whether the Minister is in a position to give us an assurance—I will well understand if he is not—but it would be good to know that this form of communication is still in place and regularly tested, so that there are effective means to communicate with Mr Putin in the event of an escalating crisis, and that the European nations are happy that they would have an adequate means to contribute to any such communication. Such an escalation of the crisis could come if Ukraine advances to the border of Crimea.
More widely on the war, it is good that the UK has given Ukraine full support from the beginning and that we are supplying necessary equipment. It is clearly important that we do not falter in our resolve. In particular, Ukraine needs the most effective air defence systems to combat the terrible missile and drone attacks on its infrastructure. I would also like to be assured that it is being helped to combat cyberattacks, which can disable every aspect of a whole country’s infrastructure and are increasingly dangerous and damaging.
The war will end, and as very few wars end in total surrender a time will come for negotiations. When that time should be is, of course, above all a matter for the Ukrainians. But we can hope and pray that the Ukrainian push will continue and that Russian forces will be forced to retreat from the Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia areas to the borders of Russia and Crimea—although I fear that, with winter and Russian forces dug in beyond the Dnieper, it will not be easy. At that point, on the border of Crimea, when the stakes would be raised very high indeed, perhaps Mr Putin would be happy to agree to a ceasefire and engage in talks. Until that happens, I hope we will continue to give Ukraine all the military support we can, especially the air defence systems we have already agreed to, and more. I beg to move.
China may have immediate problems with Xi Jinping’s rising unpopularity and all the riots, but these will not affect its weight and influence with Moscow. Their relationship may have started out as an unlimited partnership, but China has not supplied weapons to Russia, and it has applied quite a few financial and trading controls. China’s business community is deeply apprehensive about the effect of Putin’s war on their world business. For example, Chinese citizens are not even allowed to use their credit cards in Russia and have to carry around piles of cash when they visit. They would much prefer being mediators to being rooters for Russian success.
Longer term, China is a big nuclear power and now, according to the Americans, it is planning—idiotically, in my view—to triple its nuclear arsenal. By preparing for superpower conflict and hegemonic struggle with the US, it is heading on precisely the wrong route, greatly to the detriment of the Chinese people. This unfolding crisis, with its impatient and aggressive turn towards Taiwan, is the next chapter. All needs urgently to be managed and controlled, as it was in the Cold War, to prevent the situation turning red hot. We will need many further debates on that, but in the meantime, ugly though Chinese policies have become in many areas, and on our guard though we must be with every action they take, this is one area where we must work with the Chinese so they carry on being the vital restraint on Russia’s nuclear madness.
I strongly support NATO as the bedrock of our security; it has served us well. But I beg of the powers within its structures to seek wise counsel. Russia cannot persist in this madness. While we wait for compromise, there will be no winners. Millions worldwide are suffering from the consequences of this war.
My political friends—dwindling in number, I understand, over my position—believe the Russians always intended to occupy the Ukraine. I profoundly disagree. It wanted a non-nuclear, non-NATO, compliant barrier state. Incidentally, its eastern boundaries are only 300 miles from Moscow.
I believe there is room for compromise, and I have proposed the following since the beginning, earlier this year: the withdrawal of the Azov Battalions and Russian forces; the reversal of the decision banning official use of the Russian language in the Donbass; the recognition by Ukraine of separate regional status for two eastern provinces—one of which by majority is Russian speaking—and their retention as devolved regions under Ukraine’s sovereignty; the rejection by NATO of Ukraine’s application; and the retention of non-nuclear barrier status, as I have previously alluded to.
It is still not too late. Let us end this nightmare and start the talking. Russia will inevitably have to change and compromise. This war that we are pursuing is not helping the process.
Thirdly, given that the non-kinetic dimensions of this conflict are not by-products of war but are most definitely the primary vectors of strategic attack, where is the Government’s strategic narrative that explains this to the British people and demands of them the necessary sacrifices? I worry that wider society is currently completely confused by a set of toxic debates about Covid, Brexit and government economic incompetence, when the most significant factor in play in the cost of living crisis is that we are actually at war—but not a war of a variety that most people recognise.
One must not forget that anyone born before 1990 had, at the age of 12, to swear an oath to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“to passionately love and cherish my Motherland, to live as the great Lenin bade us to, as the Communist Party teaches us to”
and as the laws of the pioneers of the Soviet Union required. It may no longer be an oath to Lenin, but the personality cult has been restored—to Tsar Putin. In the younger, better-informed generation, there is a general feeling that the previous 30 years have been cancelled, and that it is starting from zero. Everyone in the opposition defines themselves as anti-Putin. There is no competing belief structure to rally them. To this mix, we can add the notion of martyrdom: think of Dostoyevsky and the heroes of World War II, or the Great Patriotic War as the Russians call it.
The West may dream of Ukraine’s victory and the collapse of Putin’s regime, but Zelensky wants total victory and so does Putin. At this year’s annual victory parade Putin declared, “We will never give up”. Negotiating for a peace deal seems nay impossible, particularly since the red lines are drawn around Crimea. If Ukraine attempts to retake that militarily, it will massively increase the risk of tactical strikes. What steps are His Majesty’s Government taking to neutralise this nuclear threat?
My mother’s family fled the Bolsheviks during the revolution. I have always hoped that Russia would one day be a friend but, under Putin, this will not be possible. We need to push further. Will His Majesty’s Government go further and sanction the members of Mr Putin’s regime who have supported this dreadful war?
We know that the reliability and safety of all nuclear weapons are potentially vulnerable to cyber intrusion and increasingly to disruptive technologies. This war in Ukraine has already exposed the degraded nature of Russian arms and military infrastructure, a situation that only builds upon the fallibility inherent in human nature. The use of nuclear weapons is now contingent not just on the temperament of those responsible for them but on autonomous systems and evolving weapons technology. Nuclear weapons could be detonated by accident or interference and, given that the bonds of trust between Russia and the West are fraying more every day, how could we realistically impute a lack of malign intention, even were that the case?
In response to this evolving risk, the US Congress and President have separately initiated a comprehensive fail-safe evaluation of their nuclear weapons. What assessment have our Government made of the implications of this action by our most important ally, particularly on our confidence in the fail-safe resilience of our systems and on whether we will take their lead and conduct our own similar review?
We face a moment of enormous danger. What mechanisms do we have in place to bring this conflict to an end on terms that are acceptable to Ukraine? In modern warfare, there is no such thing as a conflict that can be won by purely military means. The best that combat can offer is to fashion a context within which an acceptable settlement can be reached. But, ultimately, there will have to be a set of terms to which both Ukraine and Russia will be prepared to accede if this war is to end. It is not for this Government, or any other western Administration, to attempt to dictate the timing of such negotiations; that is a matter for President Zelensky and the people of Ukraine. But, as the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said only two weeks ago, we are reaching a time when the Russians would be negotiating from an adverse position, certainly in military terms and possibly in political terms as well.
This conflict has exposed the failures of a generation to grasp the opportunities after the Cold War to escape the global risk arising from our collective attachment to nuclear deterrence. This is not the time to look backwards; we now need to make a resolution to double down and realise the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, repeatedly expressed by representatives of the British Government and the non-proliferation treaty. When I sat on the Trident Commission alongside several colleagues from this House a decade ago, we concluded that the UK needed to do more to drive genuine multilateral disarmament. Unfortunately, what effort we have put in has not borne fruit, and the strategic situation has deteriorated further. The latest NPT review conference this August ended in failure.
We cannot simply step back and shrug our shoulders. As a nuclear weapon state and permanent member of the Security Council, we bear a special responsibility. While we rightly condemn the leadership in Moscow, we must also draw it or its successors into a constructive process that builds an inclusive European security arrangement, with strong and credible security guarantees for Ukraine. This is a fearsome challenge, perhaps more problematic than winning a war with Russia, but we owe it to ourselves, our children and our grandchildren to engage in it.
We all know that it is enormously complicated, but we have within your Lordships’ House many like the noble and gallant Lord who have great personal experience and wisdom to offer. I hope that in another debate we will hear again from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who was such a splendid Secretary-General of NATO. We all need to come together very early in the new year and have a full-scale debate on the future of Ukraine, knowing that, at the end of the day, as has been said, negotiations will have to take place. Those negotiations must be such that not an inch of the territory occupied by Ukraine on 24 February falls into Russian hands permanently. There must be international guarantees, underwritten by the United Nations, perhaps with a European NATO peacekeeping force—there is no reason why the UN and NATO should not work together in this.
The stakes are very high—they have never been higher—but we must bring calm consideration, and I hope that this useful debate will be a beginning for another chapter of that.
I have reached one conclusion which is more compatible with government thinking: that no meaningful negotiations are possible as long as President Putin remains in office and, more importantly, in power. It is not only that his personal prestige is too heavily implicated in an impossible object but that his attempt to achieve it is leading his country to disaster. His invasion of Ukraine has galvanised Ukrainian nationalism, expanded NATO, shifted the balance of power in Europe to its most anti-Russian eastern states, exposed hitherto hidden Russian military and technical weaknesses, subjected Russia to the most sweeping economic sanctions ever imposed, and provoked the emigration of many of the most talented Russian scientists, technicians, thinkers and artists. In sum, he has erected a new monument to imperfect and incompetent statesmanship.
Any settlement of the war which can inspire confidence in the future will require Mr Putin’s departure from the scene. I do not know how this is to come about; it is beyond our control. However, we can offer an incentive: our Government can say that they would be willing to join our partners in serious negotiations to end the war with a new Russian Government. This negotiation would include the future status of Crimea and the dropping of sanctions. It would encourage forces within the Russian state to implement a change of government. This is a tough but constructive policy that I would understand and support; I do not understand the present policy in intellectual terms. It might not succeed, but it is infinitely better than the dangerous bellicosity we seem to be trapped in.