Ukraine-Russia war: West must work to stop Vladimir Putin creating a new Iron Curtain – Christine Jardine MP

In the horror which has engulfed Ukraine, we have bandied about words like sovereign nation, territorial incursions, economic sanctions and military power.

And while they are all significant, there is surely one word which matters most: people.

Both in Ukraine and in Russia this morning, there are families grieving the loss of loved ones or fearful of the news that the day might bring.

In Ukrainian cities, families are trying to hold together remnants of what, just a few days ago, was a comfortable European lifestyle.

Their children have learned abrupt, painful lessons about hiding in underground stations and saying goodbye to their fathers.

Others have fled with what they could carry.

Sitting in the Westminster Parliament listening to the Prime Minister, it was difficult not to ponder, that 83 years ago, others sat in the same place listening to another leader warn of a darkness that was about to descend on Europe.

I have often scoffed at and dismissed overused hyperbole about feeling the hand of history on your shoulder. But not now. In that moment, I believe we all felt it. Shared it.

Amid the anti-Nato ramblings of Donald Trump, the UK offered golden visas to Vladimir Putin's wealth friends and indulged the Russian president's apologists (Picture: Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

And one question hung heavy in the air: how did we let this happen again?

As a child of the Cold War, I remember the sense of overwhelming relief, of celebration, in the 1990s that the constant threat and fear of a war in Europe had been lifted.

A whole host of European capitals, from Tallinn to Kyiv were opened up to us and the German people were reunited as the Soviet empire crumbled.

We genuinely believed that peaceful co-operation had finally replaced old suspicions and imperial rivalries. We revelled in its freedom.

And yet here we are.

As a student of international relations, I studied the Cuban Missile Crisis but it is only in the past few weeks that I have fully appreciated what it feels to be watching and waiting.

Hoping that, like Khrushchev, Putin would blink first and the crisis would be averted.

But he didn’t and the world is now standing on the brink, entangled in a crisis if not of our own making then very much of our own negligence.

On Thursday, in Parliament we heard of what were described as far-reaching and stringent sanctions that the government is now going to put in place.

The previous tranche of measures having failed to act as a deterrent, “countries that together comprise about half of the world economy are now engaged in maximising the pressure on one which makes up a mere two per cent” the Prime Minister told us.

In the UK, that will include new steps to target Russian finance, freeze assets and exclude Russian banks from our financial system. The amount of money that Russian nationals will be able to deposit in UK bank accounts will be limited.

Major manufacturers who have supported Putin’s war machine will be sanctioned and Russian airline Aeroflot will be banned from the UK.

And there will be tough export controls.

But while these were welcomed on all benches, there was still that question about how did it come to this.

Why had the government not done more sooner, brought forward the legislation to end Russian interference in our democracy that we all know is ready to go, and we wait for still?

How is it that a tyrant, who we could all surely see for what he is, has his talons sunk so deep into our financial and economic structures that extraction will be both difficult and painful for us?

The warning signs were there: Crimea, Georgia, Salisbury.

There were fears that both our own and the US elections had been interfered with either to destabilise our democracies or to ensure that they fell into hands that Putin approved of.

And yet this country persisted in offering golden visas to Russian oligarchs, chums of Putin, while rejecting the genuine pleas of foreign nationals like those at the forefront of our battle against coronovirus.

We even indulged Putin apologists in the media while we tried to counter the damaging anti-Nato ramblings of Donald Trump.

My own party leader Sir Edward Davey put it succinctly this week when he spoke about our complacency over our security and financial structures.

The danger was clear and present but in our enthusiasm to put the Cold War behind us and embrace our neighbours, we did not recognise it.

The people of Ukraine, and many in Russia too, are now paying a heavy price for our miscalculation.

It will take time for those sanctions to bite. That long-term prospect will have been little if any comfort to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyyas he pleaded with Western leaders to do more to stop Russia’s assault.

And as Kyiv was attacked I thought of the elderly Ukrainian woman I heard on the radio saying she was born in 1940 during a war and now feared she would die in one too.

It is for people like her across Europe who have known and suffered oppression that the resolve in parliament, indeed everywhere, that we should stand with Ukraine must prevail. Regardless of how long it takes.

This outrageous assault by Putin must end in failure, as the Prime Minister promised last week.

This coming Saturday March 5, is, ironically perhaps, the 76th anniversary of that famous speech in which Winston Churchill opined that “an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe”.

My generation were privileged to enjoy 30 years when it was lifted. Three precious decades in which we thought not of those things which had divided our peoples for centuries, but of those common goals of peace and prosperity which unite us.

It is in our hands now to ensure that it doesn’t fall once more and deprive another generation of their freedom.

Christine Jardine is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West

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