To ask His Majesty’s Government what is their policy with regard to the Ukraine war following the new policy of the government of the United States of America.
My Lords, before we start the QSD, I remind all noble Lords participating of the now four-minute time limit for contributions, other than for the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, and the Minister. I ask all colleagues to stick to this time and begin winding their remarks before approaching the four-minute mark to protect time for other contributions and the Minister’s response. If we do run to time, speakers in the gap can have up to two minutes.
Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, last Thursday, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, asked the House to take note of the UK’s international position. My purpose today is narrower but more urgent; to ask the Government what their Ukraine policy now is. It is urgent because the Trump Administration have torn up the familiar script. I wish the Government had offered a full-length debate to consider the consequences of this.
I remind your Lordships of the script. The King’s Speech of 17 July promised full support to Ukraine and a clear path to NATO membership. That was of course before the American election. It echoed what David Lammy, Labour’s prospective Foreign Secretary, had written in May, which was that
“the British government must leave the Kremlin with no doubt that it will support Kyiv for as long as it takes to achieve victory”.
This, in turn, echoed the previous Government’s Grant Shapps: “We need consistently and reliably to do whatever Ukraine needs to win the war”. I have heard this repeated word for word all round your Lordships’ House in every Ukraine policy debate over the last four years.
Concerning Ukraine’s clear path to NATO membership, Peter Hegseth, US Defense Secretary, has just said that “NATO membership is not a realistic outcome of a negotiated peace”. So that is one plank of the King’s Speech gone.
What about full support for Ukraine’s war aims? Our leaders may have thought it necessary to pledge this to keep up Ukrainian morale, but there is not— and never was going to be—a Ukrainian victory, for the simple reason that the United States and NATO were never going to risk a war with Russia to achieve it. President Zelensky has now recognised this and accepted a ceasefire, and with it the reality of a compromised peace. In upending these pledges, the Trump Administration have upended our own reckless, dangerous and insincere quasi-commitments.
Words have real effects. Words such as “unprovoked”, “full-scale”, “barbaric” and “criminal” to describe Russian actions, which have tripped effortlessly off ministerial tongues, closed the door to diplomacy. You do not talk to people you label criminals and pariahs. It is an important step forward that no member of the Trump Administration has used this language since the President has been in office.
As far as I know, there has been—and the Minister might confirm this—no direct contact with the Russian Government since the war started. The Russian embassy in London has been treated as an unwelcome outpost of an enemy state. So much for the role of diplomacy in the last four years.
The UK needs to provide some thought leadership on how to end this tragic conflict. To his credit, our Prime Minister has made a start. At the London meeting of 2 March, Sir Keir Starmer proposed a four-point peace plan. The first point was to keep up military aid to Ukraine and economic pressure on Russia. I agree with this, but we should not be tempted to provide the kind of military help urged by some of our warmongers, which will only lead to a dangerous escalation.
The noble Lord again ploughs his eccentric but consistent furrow. I heard not a scintilla of criticism of President Putin, nor indeed of the invasion of the state of Ukraine.
I will make three brief comments. First, President Trump has thrown a large rock in the pond, and the changes will be profound and possibly long-term. Secondly, recent events have shown key insights into the President’s worldview and his negotiating position, which can be very brutal and show no sign of a sense of history. Finally, there is clearly a major gulf between the parties. We are told by the Americans today that President Putin agrees with President Trump’s philosophy; I wonder what that can mean.
Clearly, one major gulf is the security guarantees and what a backstop can mean. Does my noble friend agree that a backstop is absolutely necessary to buttress any forces which go in? Otherwise, it will be a clear green light to the Russians to bank on the relative weakness of Ukraine.
We were told that the ball was in President Zelensky’s court. Now he has made this major concession of accepting, without conditions, President Trump’s suggestion, but there has been no similar response from President Putin. Does this mean, or should it mean, that we can now expect some similar pressure on President Putin to agree to this ceasefire, or are we going to have more conditions, more prevarication and more time buying for his own ends?
My Lords, I think we should listen quite carefully to some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, made. I have some agreement with some of them, but I think he is missing one vital dimension that he did not and a lot of people do not mention: that we are living in a digital age, in which the fundamental nature of war has changed and in which the fundamental repository of power and influence and the nature of that influence, throughout the entire planet, have changed. If we had been confined to just two minutes, which I think was the plan at one time, rather than four, I was going to make—and I still will—just two basic points around that proposition.
The first is to plead that we do not overestimate, as we did in the 20th century, the power of the so-called great powers to fix things and to arrange their empires so that the world is fixed to their pleasure, with total disregard for the rest of the world—the smaller countries and so on. That is the language of the 20th century. It is not the language of the 21st century. It completely underestimates the power and influence of a multipolar world and the power and influence of mass hyper-connectivity around it.
My second point is that, just as we should not overestimate the capacity of Russia, one hears President Trump, in some of his more exotic moments, overestimating even the power of America—still a mighty, powerful country but not the automatic leader of the western world, because we no longer deal in automatic leaders; we deal in multi-powers. We do not even deal in a western world, because a great many of the powers that are deeply interested in this belong in the east and south of the planet.
I had a fascinating conversation with a very senior Japanese official last week, and the first thing he said was that if Russia’s unprovoked, or anyway unjustified and atrocious, attack on women and children, killing thousands of civilians—the killing continues, even while we talk of ceasefires—is in any way rewarded, that is the end of the international rule of law. That is the end of safety for nations of the kind that, on the whole, on and off, we have tried to preserve, not always with success, for the last few hundred years.
My Lords, as events move apace, it is absolutely right that we in this House ask the Government to restate their policy, and in that regard the Government know of these Benches’ support for it. That does not prevent us asking questions or seeking that they go further and faster, and I will end on that point, but there is full support for the Government’s actions on these Benches.
As we have a couple of extra minutes, I thought that, for the benefit of the noble Lord, I would repeat the 10 points that President Zelensky outlined in September last year as the very reasonable and, I believe, fully justifiable points that he considered to be the basis of a peace plan. The first was radiation and nuclear safety for the people of Ukraine. Then there was food security, then energy security and the release of all prisoners and deportees. Fifthly, there was the implementation of the UN charter and the recognition of territorial integrity in any final peace agreement. The sixth would be the withdrawal of Russian troops and the cessation of hostilities. I hope that the latter part of that may well come to fruition. The seventh was justice for the very many war crimes that have been inflicted on the people of Ukraine, then the immediate protection of the environment and the prevention of escalation. The 10th was the official confirmation of the end of war in a treaty.
Those must all be considered sensible and justifiable, because we all, I hope, would want peace to help the victim of aggression, not to reward the perpetrator—otherwise, history will condemn us all. It seems that there is potentially an incentive in a pause for Putin to regroup, recruit and refinance. There are too many nations, many of them allied to us, that potentially see profiting opportunities and will now, worryingly, have carte blanche to trade with Putin because the US’s new stance will not be a block for them doing so. It is also likely that Putin will seek to insist on protracted discussions on concessions unpalatable to us and Ukraine. In the scenario where those concessions may be palatable to President Trump but not to us, how are we navigating that very delicate situation? I heard the Foreign Secretary speak with clarity earlier, but that must surely be the situation with regard to the position of President Trump.
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Purvis.
As he points out, peace is not only the absence of war but the presence of justice and of the conditions for human flourishing. Therefore, what we need is a just and lasting peace. This peace must address the causes of the war and provide for Ukraine’s security, sovereignty and freedom. We must recognise that this peace needs to be negotiated by all parties and cannot be dictated by the US. We must recognise that any ceasefire will need to be maintained through a combination of mechanisms, such as troops on the ground and trained mediators who can deal with the contentious and central issues, such as access to resources and the repatriation of civilians.
While there has been talk in recent days about the uplift in the defence budget, investment in new military platforms is also needed. We must also ensure that proportionate funds are spent on preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution tools and development. We need to see a step change in Britain’s investment in active peacebuilding and conflict resolution capabilities. Active peacebuilding will not on all occasions prevent a descent into conflict, but its focus on prevention and mitigation represents value for money for the taxpayer, given the extraordinary costs that war now involves.
Can the Minister say what consideration has been given along these lines and towards active peacebuilding, including development?
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, for securing this debate and agree with much of what he said.
Stepping back and looking at the last three years of war—in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza—our Government and military policy have learned an enormous amount about up-to-the-minute warfare and states’ capabilities. We are living in the age of the drone and the hypersonic missile. Russia is clearly much weakened after expending its stores of men, munitions and money. So I query the assertion that it is eyeing greater swathes of eastern Europe, given its much-depleted status. This is not Munich. We appeased Hitler when his army was intact and bellicose and before a shot was fired, whereas we are now three years into a bloodbath.
If Russia is expansionist, we should calmly consider why. In the Cuban missile crisis, when the USSR parked its missiles on its doorstep in Cuba, the US understandably felt very threatened, and we were all a blink away from nuclear war. Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO presented a similar threat to Russia, as would a peacekeeping coalition of willing NATO countries’ soldiers—NATO’s missiles on its doorstep.
Turning to Trump, it is fashionable for commentators in this country and Europe to be scathing and disdainful, but there was no major war during his last presidency. Anthropologists say that war is failed trade and as deals are what drive him, he wants peace. He wants to be known for peace, requiring others to strive for peace too. That was what the Trump-Zelensky-Vance drama in the White House was all about. Listening to the whole press conference and the quiet Zelenskian aggression reveals that he, Trump and Vance were worlds apart. As Trump said at the end, it is going to be a tough deal to make because attitudes have to change. He did not play nice and now attitudes are changing.
There is also the important aim of keeping Putin out of the arms of Xi Jinping. Are the Government adjusting their expectations and encouraging others who might be in the coalition of the willing to do the same so that the West, broadly, is in line with Trump’s position?
My Lords, I apologise, as I have lost my voice, although I would love to deliver a few very short remarks.
The war in Ukraine has entered its darkest and most decisive phase. To the east, Ukraine faces the advancing Russian army, and to the west, a reluctant and ambivalent United States, alongside those who doubt our resolve to ensure Ukraine’s survival as a sovereign country.
What we debate here today matters. It matters to every Ukrainian woman, man and child. They did not start this war. For them, this is not a theoretical exercise but a struggle for survival. It also matters to us, the rest of Europe and, indeed, the world how this war ends, as much depends on ensuring that borders are never changed by force and that aggression is not rewarded. We must be clear: a just and lasting peace cannot be one that legitimatises conquest.
We have seen the consequences of such an approach elsewhere. The Dayton agreement brought the end of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but it left a legacy: a recognition of ethnic cleansing and genocide as tools that get rewarded and tolerated. As I have warned many times—sadly, to little effect—recent developments in the region have brought it to the brink of conflict again. The lesson is clear: rewarding aggression does not bring stability; it invites only further conflict.
I welcome the Prime Minister’s steadfast support for Ukraine and his commitment to standing firm against Russian aggression. However, I am concerned that he and others may come under pressure from the United States to support a flawed peace agreement. I ask for assurance from the Minister that the United Kingdom will not ever, as a part of any negotiated peace, recognise Russian sovereignty over Ukraine’s occupied territories.
History has shown that appeasement and weakness do not secure lasting peace. The shift in American policy is regrettable, but we must not let it dictate our response. If it teaches us anything, it is that we must firmly stand for Ukraine’s sovereignty, because a weak, divided Ukraine will make Europe and us less safe and less secure, and mark the beginning of an era in which the Europe we have known ceases to exist.
My Lords, I spoke in a previous debate about two lazy and dangerous assumptions that are sometimes applied in areas of conflict: first, that everyone involved is a victim; and, secondly, that every side within a conflict is in some way a perpetrator or somehow culpable. Nowhere more clearly illustrates the fallacy of those notions than Ukraine. Let us be absolutely clear: Ukraine is the victim and Putin’s Russia is the perpetrator and the aggressor. It slightly beggars belief that I even have to reassert that fact.
Everyone in this House and beyond, and particularly the people of Ukraine, want to see peace. We realise that will mean peace with a level of compromise, which many of us will be deeply disturbed about; but we also want to see a peace which is lasting and, as much as possible, just. I believe that the best way to achieve that peace is through strength, security and deterrence. Those were watchwords that I know were talked about in relation to the Cold War by the noble Lord who asked this Question. Those were notions that served us well in the Cold War, which is appropriate, because if anyone in this world is a Cold War warrior, it is Vladimir Putin. He has a toxic mix of Soviet dominance and Russian nationalism and views many of the states that surround him as artificial concepts which, if given the opportunity, he would annex; or, alternatively, he would try to put in place a puppet regime sympathetic to his aims.
What should our response be to this in the West? I think there are five things that we need to do. First, we need to continue, both in public and in private, and in word and deed, to be tough with Russia. Yes, we want to see peace achieved, but it cannot simply be a peace dictated by the terms of Vladimir Putin, or on the timetable of Vladimir Putin.
Secondly, as the UK we need, in difficult circumstances, to try to maintain our relationship with the United States, and to act as that bridge between Europe and the United States, to try to ensure that the USA remains heavily involved in the European theatre.
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We should also understand the limits of economic sanctions. Trump has threatened bad financial things if Russia rejects a ceasefire, but Russia is already the most sanctioned nation in the world. The purpose of sanctions, as often stated, was to degrade Russia’s ability to wage war. However, Russia has opened up alternative import routes for essential supplies and markets for its oil, energy and natural gas exports. The sanctions regime is, and will remain, much too full of holes to prevent Russia finishing its business with Ukraine. Nevertheless, the promise of its withdrawal does remain a powerful potential inducement to bring Russia to the negotiating table.
I agree with the second point that any lasting peace must guarantee Ukraine’s security, but Sir Keir said nothing about Russia’s security. He reflected the standard Whitehall view that NATO was never a real threat to Russia. This script, too, must be scrapped. Any durable peace must take into account the security concerns of both Ukraine and Russia.
I agree with the third point, that we must increase our military spending, but I mistrust the reason most often given, which is to meet the Russian threat. That is just a replay of Cold War rhetoric. European defence spending needs to go up, not because Russia threatens Europe but because Europe and Britain need to shoulder a larger share of NATO’s costs. We cannot go on expecting America to pay for our protection for ever.
Sir Keir Starmer’s fourth point is that the UK, with countries such as France, should place troops on the ground and aircraft in the air to enforce the ceasefire. This has always been a non-starter, despite the mindless repetition of the cliché “coalition of the willing”. The Trump Administration will not agree to provide the necessary backstop, and Russia, as could have been expected, has rejected the idea of NATO forces being stationed in Ukraine under a different name. Why make a proposal which is bound to be rejected unless the intention is to prolong hostilities? I concur therefore with Anatol Lieven when he says:
“Any peacekeeping force must come from genuinely neutral countries under the authority of the United Nations”.
Standing in the way of more realistic UK appraisals is the continuing misinterpretation of the motives of Putin and Trump. Time and again, I have heard noble Lords echo the Government’s line that, unless Putin is seen to fail in Ukraine, he will be “emboldened” to broaden his assault on Europe, starting with Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states—and where will it end? I believe this profoundly misinterprets both his intentions and Russia’s capabilities.
Of course one can argue endlessly about what Putin’s intentions are, but I concur with many specialists who believe that, above all, he wants Russia to be surrounded by neutral states, not by NATO missiles. A slight knowledge of history will explain why this might be so. However, I agree with Professor Jeffrey Sachs that we should not provoke the bear by inflaming ethnic nationalism in Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania, as we did in Ukraine. A durable peace with a prickly nuclear power requires great prudence. As for Russia’s expansionary capacity, I will just cite Owen Matthews in the Spectator:
“the supposedly mighty Russian army has been fought to a standstill not by Nato … but by Ukraine’s once-tiny military”.
We must also scrap our Trump-phobic narrative. This views him as an amoral deal maker with no principles, cozying up to dictators. In fact, President Trump has consistently and persistently said “Stop the killing” —an eminently moral standpoint sometimes ignored by our own humanitarians. He has replaced a passive war policy with an active search for peace. If he does succeed in ending the war, he will richly deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Government have been talking about a peace process based on sticks, but in diplomacy you need both sticks and carrots. Where are the carrots? What positive incentives are we offering Russia to make peace? I would like the Minister, in winding up, to endorse the blessed phrase “compromise peace”. Only if he does so can we be sure that the script has changed.
An equally senior Australian official came to me and said, “Australia is ready to contribute”. This is a world issue, not just a European issue, as Mr Trump seems to think, and some of our leaders here seem to think, although I acknowledge that our present leader and Prime Minister has played the hand very skilfully indeed. This is not just a European issue but an issue that threatens the balance of organisations and power throughout the entire planet.
I can understand the Japanese nervousness. If Xi Jinping gets the wrong signal, which is that having a go—violence of a limited kind—pays off, he will think about the same approach to annexing and suffocating Taiwan. That is the danger. This is a wider world issue. We should not assume that it is just a narrow matter between America and Russia to fix.
I am not a naive, and I do not think Davids will always beat Goliaths. Goliaths are always going to win by size, but the Davids are very powerful. I am told the Ukrainians have 1 million drones in manufacture, processing and deploying. The impact of this on the nature of war, on the nature of bigger and heavier equipment, is enormous. When we realise that the world has changed to that degree, we will have a much clearer vision of which way now to proceed.
From the American point of view, sometimes unpredictability can work. It is called strategic ambiguity. The key word is “strategic”, but that is lacking, in many respects, from the Trump Administration, especially since his last comments on seeking discussions on land and power plants and dividing up certain assets. If this was between Ukraine and Russia, perhaps we might have sympathy for it, but my worry is that the negotiations will be between Russia and the United States when it comes to dividing up certain aspects such as land rights and energy rights.
So can the Minister confirm that, in this new time of flux, we can move unilaterally to seize, not just freeze, assets; that we can work with a coalition of the willing, even if that means a more diluted American standpoint; and that we can embolden our strategic relationship with our European allies for defence procurement, defence co-operation and defence purchasing? Surely this is an opportunity for us to make sure that the victim does not pay the price for the perpetration from Putin.
Thirdly, the Prime Minister is right to try to build a coalition of the willing. That coalition must continue to deliver that military aid and do so in a manner that is speedy and ensures that there is a flow of support to Ukraine. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that we need to look at this in a more global sense and look beyond simply the allies we can have within Europe, particularly to our friends in the Commonwealth, to build that broader consensus.
Fourthly, Ukraine needs security guarantees. It is naive to believe that simply economic links with Ukraine will be a sufficient deterrent; it has not proven that way in the past. Russia could see itself, if you like, overseeing a different contract on that basis.
Fifthly and finally, the one thing on which I largely agree with the American position is that we need a boost to our defence spending beyond the 2.5% to 3%. In the worst-case scenario, we are left with a United States Government who look at the world as spheres of influence and see Europe as not being part of their remit. The best-case scenario is that in the future we see an America that is much more focused on concerns about China. We have to step up in Europe and be able to provide our own support.
Those elements seem to me to be the direction of travel of both the previous Government and the current Government. While they continue to move in that direction, they will continue to have my support, and I suggest that they should have the support of this House—if not unanimous support then that of the vast majority. Let us all stand together with the people and Government of Ukraine.