Speech to the Baltic Defence College Conference on Russia

Speech to the Baltic Defence College Conference on Russia

Tartu, Estonia, Thursday 5th March 2026

The Rt Hon Lord Robertson of Port Ellen

Speaking today on the Estonian border with Russia, I have a controversial confession. I have a genuine affection for Russia and for the people of Russia. It goes back a long time, and it has not been undermined by the recent behaviour of the Russian government. Indeed, it goes back to my school days when I visited Leningrad in 1963 on the converted troop ship MV Devonia – an ‘educational ‘cruise they called it.

850 Scottish and Irish school students were, in spite of their provocative behaviour, welcomed warmly and with generosity. We were strange visitors to the Soviet Union’s second city, and we were regarded as dangerous aliens by the security forces. But the KGB could track a single person, even an InTourist group, but not 850 unruly undisciplined kids. Our Soviet counterparts were in awe at what we were and how we dressed and behaved and we left them cheering our projectiles aimed at their police.

Thereafter I visited the USSR with the British Soviet Round Tables, with Denis Healey to the 40^th anniversary of the end of World War 2 in 1985, in 1986 as a visitor to the 27^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, in 1989 led a Fabian Society Delegation to Leningrad, Moscow and Tbilisi, and I met Gorbachev when he first visited London in 1984.  I have visited Volgograd, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov on Don and Nizhnyvartovsk in Siberia.

I was Deputy Chairman of BP’s joint venture with Russian oligarchs and knew and liked its thousands of employees. I was among Vladimir Putin’s first foreign visitors after his surprise appointment as President-elect in 2001 and saw him on many occasions leading up to and beyond the NATO Russia Summit in 2002.  I got on well with him. Those were indeed very different days.

I outline that catalogue, not to impress you with my travel history or biography, but to show – maybe prove, that I am not a long-time foe of Russia but a friend and especially now, a critical one.

At that ceremony in Red Square in1995 I could not but reflect on the fact that had it not been for the sacrifices made by the Russian people in that war against the Nazis, we might be speaking German today. If indeed I was actually alive since my father fought with the Royal Air Force. 

Here we are today in Tartu in close proximity to St Petersburg where its citizens, including the parents of the current President, fought under siege, for 892 days to contribute to our freedom today.  Whatever the iniquities of the Soviet Union, and they are manifest, their contribution to our freedom today should not be underestimated. Or undervalued either. 

So, I ask the simple question. Do the people of Russia support the war on Ukraine? 

What about the ones I have known and been friends with for years, and the ones I worked with in TNK-BP, or the young people who came to my English Speaking Union lecture at St Petersburg State University, or the ones who cheered me at the Volgograd Technical University or at my lecture at MGIMO – the Russian State Institute for International Relations? 

And what about the retired Generals and Admirals who listened to me at the Military Chiefs Club of the Russian Federation in 2008 and what about the many, many decent Russians who were previously plugged into Western society, and all the ones who loved the fact that Russia was part of the outside world and respected as part of the global liberal democratic order? 

Do they all believe their President when he is committed to violently and expensively absorbing Ukraine into ancient Russian borders? 

I don’t believe they do. Some of them apparently say ‘It happened, so I have to support it’, or ‘My President must know more than I do’. Others simply rally round the flag once the military are in action. I have heard all of these comments. Many, in the face of a very tough legal clamp down, simply decide to have no opinion. 

But the fact is that the ordinary Russian citizen has been subjected to a systematic campaign of disinformation and lies that has polluted any discourse on the merits of what is happening today. That is sad for Russia and tragic for the besieged but defiant people of Ukraine. 

The Russian people have been lied to that this is not a war. It is allegedly a Special Military Operation. And yet it IS a war, on the sovereign state of Ukraine, and the full-scale invasion clearly violated the UN Charter and every agreement that Russia has signed since the end of the Cold War. The fairy tale which is peddled, of course, is that Gorbachev was tricked on NATO enlargement, that Yeltsin must have been fooled into sign the Helsinki Final Act, the Paris Agreement, and the NATO Russia Founding Act.  

But, in contrast to that invention, Putin himself signed with me the Rome Declaration on 28 May 2002 which committed to ‘respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security, the inviolability of borders and people’s right to self-determination’. 

No messing, no fudging, no caveats, he signed up to that solemn agreement – and then betrayed it. 

The Russian people have been lied to about the human cost of this war. Well over a million military personnel have been killed or seriously injured and a tsunami of social problems is coming home with mentally damaged soldiers. 

The Russian people have been lied to about the huge damage being inflicted on the Russian economy by this war. War production has taken priority with all the distortions that brings. It’s eating up at least but probably more than 6% of GDP and swallowing over a third of the annual budget. Wars are expensive (deterring them is always cheaper) and if he was honest, he might remind Russians that Britain finally paid for the second world war in 2016. (And we, unlike Putin in Ukraine, won that one). Generations of Russians to come will be paying back for today’s folly. 

He lies again to the Russian people about NATO. NATO is not at war with Russia as he ludicrously claims. NATO is a purely defensive Alliance of 32 like-thinking nations. It has absolutely no hostile intent towards Russia and its territory – indeed on that sunny day in 2002 in Practica Di Mare Airbase near Rome we welcomed Russia – its President, with his Foreign and Defence Ministers to the round table of the inaugural NATO Russia Council which I chaired. The countries of NATO and beyond are simply helping the Ukrainian people to fight back against the invaders. 

And he’s lying to the Russian people about history too. In his head he has confected a version of history which sees Ukraine with no right to exist as a sovereign nation. And that’s from the man who stood beside me on 28 May 2002, only 24 years ago and said this ‘Ukraine is a sovereign nation which will make its own decision about peace and security.’ And now apparently it has to be brutally occupied by Russian storm troopers. 

He lies again to the Russian people about the future for generations of young Russians. With a million young Russians either dead or emigrated, the seed corn is lost.   

He lies also to the Russian people recklessly about threatening the nuclear weapons he has in huge numbers but the scaremongering lacks credibility or military utility. President Xi and Prime Minister Modi have vetoed that insane particular kind of coercion and dangerous scaremongering. 

He lies to the Russian people about the partnership with China and North Korea but knows in himself – and to the world, that he has made Russia permanently subordinate to these suspected and hated dictatorships. 

But most importantly he lies to the wider circle of those who know that he is not credible in what he espouses. Those he addresses in the Kremlin with his incredible theories know that it is nonsense. These people are not the citizens of the old Soviet Union, starved of information of the outside world. Four and a half years ago they lived, worked, invested and holidayed in that outside world. Can they possibly believe that Ukraine is run by Nazis and that NATO threatens Russia every day?

 That famous strategist of World War 2, Sir Basin Liddell-Hart once wisely said “The outcome of a battle will be more determined in the minds of the commanders than in the bodies of their men”. 

And therein lies the truth of this battle.

It is in the mind of the man in the Kremlin that the fate of Ukraine – and indeed the future of Europe lies.

And the question for all of us is how can he be persuaded to use the folly of what he is doing?

He set out to stop the onward march of NATO – although in all the meetings I had with him in the Kremlin and elsewhere he never once complained about NATO enlargement – even when these three previously Soviet Baltic States were about to be welcomed but has seen Sweden and Finland join up.

He set out to occupy Ukraine in three days and four years later he occupies less than he did at the start of the war.

He set out to divide Europe, and it is historically united as never before and he wanted to divide Europe from the US, and we are now welded as one.

We need somehow to penetrate that tight circle who tell the President that, against all evidence, he is winning. We need, as we did in the days of the Soviet Union, to get a message through to the people of Russia, that they cannot live on lies and propaganda. There is a future for Russia and its people in a world of truth and democracy and liberal prosperity. We need to multiply our efforts to get that message across.

Let me finish with some important words:

“We should remember that, more than half a century ago, humanity paid with tens of millions of lives for the criminal short-sightedness and hesitation of politicians in joining forces against the common enemy. We are now facing a task which is comparable in scale by historical standards. Yes, the current threat is in a new guise and has a different ethos, but it is no less dangerous for the fate of humanity.”

Not my words – but true, nonetheless. The words of President VV Putin at the NATO Russia Summit in 2002. They were true when he said them then and they are true today. Let them be heard again.

This article has been reposted with the kind permission of the 

Rt Hon Lord Robertson of Port Ellen KT GCMG HonFRSE PC

The Lord Robertson of Port Ellen served as the 10th Secretary General of NATO from 1999 to 2003. As a member of the Labour Party he served as Secretary of State for defence form 1997-1999, Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland from 1993-1997. He was a member of Parliament for Hamilton South from 1978 to 1999 and was appointed to the House of Lords as a life pair in 2000

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