Speech at a rally outside the Russian Embassy on 1 March 2023.

THE CAUSE OF UKRAINE

  With the war in Ukraine, a question has been asked that perhaps we thought no longer needed to be asked - at least not here. Is there anything worth dying for?

It is, of course, a question to which none of us will know the answer until it comes to light. People who are prepared to risk their lives for something or someone else, generally have no intention of doing so, and would probably prefer not to. They have simply found themselves in a situation where the question has arisen. It may be in a small way; risking life for another human being, and it may be in a big way; risking life for freedom. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that he did not need help to escape but ammunition to defend himself, he was in effect declaring: 'I am prepared to die in defence of freedom'.

Since then, it has become abysmally clear that what Zelensky is prepared to die for is not only Ukraine's freedom, but, by extension, the world order which, with all its flaws and hypocrisies, is the world order on which our freedom ultimately rests too.

 A world in which Putin is allowed to prevail is a world in which war crimes are allowed to establish themselves as a means of power. And nuclear weapons are allowed to establish themselves as a means of blackmail. And might is allowed to establish itself as right.

 That is to say, a very different world from the one we thought we were living in since the Second World War, and which has rested on an order of international laws and conventions that were supposed to prevent precisely the kind of lawless violence on which Vladimir Putin is prepared to build his power.

 So the question has undeniably arisen: how much are we prepared to sacrifice in defence of freedom?

 The last time the question was so strongly pressed, the threat was Hitler, and to the very end there were those who thought it safest, or at least most convenient, to give Hitler what Hitler wanted. Until, contrary to all treaties and agreements, he had sufficiently armed himself to start the war that would devastate Europe and kill up to 80 million people.

 Stopping Hitler required people who were prepared to die to do so.

 Even people who were pacifists by conviction were prepared to do so in the end. The German priest and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by Hitler in the spring of 1945, was convinced that when peace destroys truth and justice, peace must be broken and war proclaimed.

 The eventual peace that would result from a Putin victory would, of course, rest on the grossest of lies and injustices, and those who argue today that even such a peace is better than continued war are arguing in much the same way as those who argued for peace with Hitler at the cost of one lie and injustice after another to the very end. And eventually at the cost of much more than that.

 I know no more than anyone else how a world order based on international law and justice can in the long run defend itself against an enemy that is prepared, with the threat of nuclear weapons, to commit the grossest war crimes and propagate the grossest lies to break it down.

 But I think it would be a good thing if we could ask ourselves once again: what is worth dying for?

 If only to reconsider what freedom is worth.

 Freedom is a big word – difficult to define and easy to misuse.

And perhaps we don't really understand how to value it until we are in danger of losing it.

 In Ukraine, we are seeing what freedom means for people who are at risk of losing it.

 And what they are prepared to sacrifice to defend it.

And in doing so, we also see better what is at stake for all of us - and why Ukraine's cause must also be ours.