Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)

My Lords, I echo the many congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Spellar. He has always been wise and brave. That will be much appreciated in your Lordships’ House. I will refer in particular to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Banner, earlier in the debate. His insights were very valuable to this debate. I raised the Storm Shadow issue with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, earlier and I hope we will hear from the noble Baroness the Minister that the years of simply slipstreaming United States decision-making are over. We may within days have to face a very different United States and we cannot rely on the past for a good future. My noble friend Lord Alton raised the way in which sanctioned moneys are used. In the criminal jurisdiction of this country, within which I have operated for decades, when we confiscate money from a criminal, we do not simply use the interest: we use the capital. We should do exactly the same with the money confiscated from Russians who are, in reality, international criminals. We may well be told that that involves examining some treaties, but, if we examine treaties which affect Putin and his cronies, it will not worry him because he ignores every relevant treaty that affects what he has been doing. It is time we changed our attitude and used that money to revive the fortunes, literally, of Ukraine. As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, did, I will talk about the city of Lviv. It has been subjected to serious bombing, damage and death. I went there first in 1991 in the company of a brave woman called Frederika Katzner. She was my mother. She was brought up in Lvov, as it was then. It was part of Poland. She married a husband there who was murdered, like so many of my ancestors, by the Nazis. She was an extraordinary Holocaust survivor. She did not return to Lvov—as she always called it—for 50 years, because my father would not let her go back. I took her there in 1991. It was a most remarkable experience because, throughout my childhood and earlier adult life, I had heard so much about Lvov and the way she described it. She always spoke of a Polish and also Habsburgian city where she had an advantaged childhood and a wonderful education, and was steeped in western and central European culture. Putin has an obsession with not the Soviet but the White Russian past; he claims that Ukraine is part of Russia and always has been. That is what drives him to a great extent—helped in many ways, I regret, by the Russian Orthodox Church. Those are completely irrational views. My visit to Lviv in 1991 and my few visits since have confirmed to me that there is no rational basis for saying that Lviv or Ukraine are Russian. I have visited other parts of the country too, including staying in Kyiv. I hope we will not resist reminding Putin at every possible turn that this is an independent central European country which shares far more with us than it does with “Mother Russia”. Indeed Ukraine, as a result of its post-Soviet adoption of rule of law standards and its new political system, largely thanks to the election of Zelensky after some difficult political changes, has established itself as part of our European family. In my view, this debate is ample demonstration that, as we have heard from many noble Lords, we must stand by Ukraine. But I agree to a great extent with the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, that we do not stand by Ukraine if we simply say so. It is in that context that we live. To me, it all feels a little bit like 1938, and I do not think there should be another 1938.