I am grateful for the opportunity to raise tonight the subject of the United Kingdom's policy towards the Crisis in Chechnya.

We ought to consider the effect of the Chechnya Crisis on the region's other major security problem - the Nagorny Karabakh conflict.

The longer-term implications of the Chechnya Crisis remain unclear.

In the current financial year it will enable us to provide, for example, additional emergency aid for Bosnia and Rwanda, and to deal with the Crisis in Chechnya.

Mr. Goodlad: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs last discussed the Crisis in Chechnya with the German Foreign Minister, Herr Kinkel, on 1 February.

Did the Prime Minister make it clear to Mr. Yeltsin, as other leaders did, that our desire for him to act over Serbia, and our deploring of any acts of terrorism by Chechen guerrillas, does not mitigate our concern for minimum standards of proper conduct on all sides in the handling of the Crisis in Chechnya?

Today I seek a clear statement from the Minister on the Government's policy towards the Crisis in Chechnya and on the ways in which the Government intend to seek a peaceful solution in the interests of Russia and of the wider region.

The Government's rhetoric of high principle in the spring, when we were told that Kosovo's increasingly blood-soaked soil demanded "a battle for humanity" and a "battle for the values of civilisation" began to resemble low compromise in the autumn when terrified refugees were once again in flight--this time Chechnyan ones--and the Government were asked to explain how their ethical dimension to foreign policy was being applied to the Crisis in Chechnya.

Rightly, the Prime Minister spent some time on the Chechnya Crisis, but why is it that European leaders cannot produce regular statements on the coalition against terrorism as opposed to other major concerns like Iraq?

A side effect of that, which the committee noted, was that because of Russian solidarity with the Us there was a distinct falling-off of criticism of Russia with regard to the Chechnya Crisis.

Does he not also agree that that intransigence plays directly into the hands of extremists, because it undermines all those who might be won into a meaningful political process to overcome the continuing Crisis in Chechnya by suggesting that everything else is ineffective and that the only thing to do if you really feel strongly is to go and join the militants?