Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Why should we care about Ukraine? There was a time when, on a right-of-centre site like this one, such a question would have been needless.
But, these days, the loudest calls for Western disengagement come from people who call themselves conservatives. Military aid is being held up in the US by Republican congressmen, and in the EU by Viktor Orbán’s nationalist government in Hungary.
So let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of why we are here.
It is not because we think that Volodymyr Zelensky is a goody-goody liberal. Sure, he is a lot more liberal than Vladimir Putin, but Ukraine is hardly a Swiss-style democracy.
If Zelensky’s proscription of pro-Russian parties can arguably be justified as a wartime contingency, his peremptory attitude to the other pro-Western parties is harder to excuse.
Earlier this month, Petro Poroshenko, the former president, was banned from attending a conference in Washington that I was at; and, although he patriotically declined to make a fuss, it left me wondering yet again why Zelensky refuses to draw other democratic parties into a wartime coalition.
Nor are we here because the Russian invasion threatens us. Putin has been bellicose enough against the United Kingdom: buzzing our airspace, targeting us with cyberattacks, flooding our media with propaganda and, on at least two occasions, carrying out what were technically acts of war against us by deploying state force to kill individuals living under the Queen’s peace.
But there is no scenario where his tanks reach the Channel.
No, the reason we are backing Ukraine is that, when it surrendered its nuclear arsenal in 1994, it did so in exchange for a promise that its independence and integrity would be protected within its existing borders. Who made that promise? The United States, Britain, and – never forget – Russia.
For Russia to break its word is an act of treachery with few historical parallels. Though Britain is not legally obliged to come to Ukraine’s aid, we are morally obliged to offer proportionate support.
You might object that we had no business signing such an undertaking in the first place. We joined two ruinous world wars, you might add, not because we had been attacked, but because we had guaranteed the independence of another state: respectively, Belgium and Poland. Had we not entered into those commitments, the course of history might have been different.
But HH Asquith and Neville Chamberlain, like Boris Johnson, recognised that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the original guarantees, we could not back away from without becoming diminished, distrusted, and despised.
Unlike those two previous guarantees, the 1994 Budapest memorandum did not commit us to military support. But our reputation is on the line none the less.
Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the world see this as a tussle between the democracies and the autocracies. The countries that have sided with Russia – Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and, to a degree, China – are motivated by dislike of open societies rather than by admiration for Putin. If Russia wins (and hanging onto land it has annexed by force would constitute a win, spin it how we will) the West will suffer a catastrophic loss of prestige.
You might say: “So what? Can you eat prestige? Who cares about something as intangible as national honour?”
To which I can only reply that that is an exquisitely Western response. In most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, prestige is as real a commodity as barley or oil. A country that is rich in what the Maōri call “mana” can wield authority and influence, inspire and lead. If the West fails to rescue a nation it has pledged to support, its mana will drain away.
And if you’re still saying “So what?”, imagine what such a world would look like. Ambitious leaders from developing countries would want to study in China. The world order would be dictated by those who had no time for individual autonomy or human rights, nor any real sense of international obligation.
(Who, for example, other than Western countries, gives altruistic development aid?)
The idea that our open societies would be left unmolested in such a world is pure fantasy. Indeed, I suspect that some of the opponents of Ukraine know it, and that this is precisely why they take the line they do.
Genuine non-interventionism – a principled adherence to neutrality – I can respect. I think that, on balance, it is naïve; but it is not absurd or dishonourable.
But, listening to the anti-Ukraine crowd, whether in Europe or the Anglosphere, I don’t hear much principled neutrality. Their argument is not “Putin’s an utter bastard, but wake me up when he gets to Dover”. Rather, it is that Putin is a patriot doing his best for his people, just as any leader should; a victim of woke propaganda; at the very least, no worse than Zelensky.
Odd to see people who boast of being more sceptical than the herd, of seeing through the MSM, guzzling Kremlin propaganda undiluted. And even odder to find them on the right.