Sir Bernard Jenkin I beg to move, That this House has considered
Russia’s grand strategy. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for
safeguarding a touch more than the three hours that we were
promised for this most important debate. I am very grateful to the
Backbench Business Committee for providing time for it at this most
crucial moment, with developments in Ukraine and elsewhere. The
term “grand strategy” may seem something of a relic from
previous...Request free trial
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Russia’s grand strategy.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for safeguarding a touch more
than the three hours that we were promised for this most
important debate. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business
Committee for providing time for it at this most crucial moment,
with developments in Ukraine and elsewhere.
The term “grand strategy” may seem something of a relic from
previous centuries, and one that became irrelevant with the end
of the cold war, but to think so would be to ignore what is
happening in today’s world. There are many Governments around the
world today who practise grand strategy, but sadly very few are
allies of the west. Most are despotic regimes that are constantly
challenging the rules-based international order on which western
security and the global trading system depend. The most
immediately threatening of such powers is, undoubtedly,
Russia.
Today’s Russia has inherited an admirably precise and uniformly
understood meaning of the term “strategy”. “Politika”, meaning
policy, stands at the top of a hierarchy of terms and describes
the goal to be achieved; “strategiya” describes how the goal is
to be achieved. Military strategy is merely a subset of global,
national or grand strategy.
So what is the goal behind Russia’s grand strategy? Putin’s goal
is nothing less than to demonstrate the end of US global hegemony
and establish Russia on an equal footing with the US; to change
Russia’s status within Europe and become the pre-eminent power;
to put Russia in a position to permanently influence Europe and
drive a wedge between Europe and the USA; and to re-establish
Russia’s de facto control over as much of the former Soviet Union
and its sphere of influence as possible. As the strategy
succeeds, Putin also intends to leverage China’s power and
influence in Russia’s own interests. China, incidentally, will be
watching how we defend Ukraine as it considers its options for
Taiwan.
On 17 December, the Russian Foreign Ministry unveiled the texts
of two proposed new treaties: a US-Russia treaty and a
NATO-Russia treaty. Moscow’s purported objective is to obtain
“legal security guarantees from the United States and NATO”.
Moscow has requested that the United States and its NATO allies
meet the Russian demands without delay.
This is, in fact, a Russian ultimatum. Putin is demanding that
the US and NATO should agree that NATO will never again admit new
members, even such neutral countries as Sweden, Finland and
Austria, which have always been in the western zone of influence;
that NATO should be forbidden from having any military presence
in the former Warsaw pact countries that have already joined
NATO; and that the US should withdraw all its nuclear forces from
Europe, meaning that the only missiles threatening European
cities would be Russian ones. The ultimatum is premised on a
fundamental lie, which Putin has promulgated since he attended
the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008 as an invited guest. That lie
is that NATO represents a threat to Russian national
security.
As Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov explained:
“The two texts are not written according to the principle of a
menu, where you can choose one or the other, they complement each
other and should be considered as a whole.”
He described the NATO-Russia text as a kind of parallel
guarantee, because
“the Russian Foreign Ministry is fully aware that the White House
may not meet its obligations, and therefore there is a separate
draft treaty for NATO countries.”
Putin’s intention is to bind NATO through the United States, and
bind the United States through NATO. There is nothing to
negotiate; they just have to accept everything as a whole.
Russian media are already triumphant, proclaiming:
“The world before, and the world after, December 17, 2021 are
completely different worlds… If until now the United States held
the whole world at gunpoint, now it finds itself under the threat
of Russian military forces. A new era is opening”.
My hon. Friend talks about Russian grand strategy and Russian
grand design. I am sure that he will come on to talk about the
way in which the Russians are using gas and energy to manipulate
and coerce our key NATO partners in central and eastern Europe,
such as Poland, with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Does he agree
that it is a disappointment that our own Government have not
imposed sanctions on the companies involved in the construction
of that pipeline?
I will not comment on that particular suggestion, but I will be
coming to the question of gas.
This ultimatum is, in fact, Russian blackmail, directed at both
the Americans and the Europeans. If the west does to accept the
Russian ultimatum, they will have to face what Deputy Foreign
Minister Alexander Grushko calls
“a military and technical alternative”.
What does he mean by that? Let me quote him further:
“The Europeans must also think about whether they want to avoid
making their continent the scene of a military confrontation.
They have a choice. Either they take seriously what is put on the
table, or they face a military-technical alternative.”
After the publication of the draft treaty, the possibility of a
pre-emptive strike against NATO targets—similar to those that
Israel inflicted on Iran—was confirmed by the Deputy Minister of
Defence, Andrei Kartapolov. He said:
“Our partners must understand that the longer they drag out the
examination of our proposals and the adoption of real measures to
create these guarantees, the greater the likelihood that they
will suffer a pre-emptive strike.”
Apparently to make things clear, Russia fired a “salvo” of Zircon
hypersonic missiles on 24 December, after which Dmitry Peskov,
the Kremlin spokesman, commented:
“Well, I hope that the notes”—
of 17 December—
“will be more convincing”.
We should be clear that Russia’s development of hypersonic
weapons is already a unilateral escalation in a new arms race
which is outside any existing arms limitation agreements. The
Russian editorialist Vladimir Mozhegov commented:
“The Zircon simply does its job: it methodically shoots huge,
clumsy aircraft carriers like a gun at cans.”
An article in the digital newspaper Svpressa was eloquently
titled “Putin’s ultimatum: Russia, if you will, will bury all of
Europe and two-thirds of the United States in 30 minutes”.
How have we reached this crisis, with the west in general, and
NATO in particular, so ill prepared to face down such
provocation, when Putin’s malign intent has been evident in his
actions for a decade and a half? Since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the west has too easily dismissed today’s Russia as a mere
shadow of the former Soviet Union. Yes, it has an economy no
greater than Italy’s; it has no ideological equivalent of
communism, which so dominated left-wing thinking throughout most
of the 20th century; it has very few if any real allies; and much
of the rhetoric that emerges is bluster, reflecting weakness
rather than strength. Nevertheless, we should not dismiss what
Russia has done since 2008 and what Russia is capable of doing
with its vast arsenal of new weaponry, and nor should we take a
complacent view of Russia’s future intentions. After all, just
months after the Bucharest summit in 2008, where he was welcomed
as a guest, Putin seized Georgian sovereign territory in Abkhazia
and South Ossetia. In 2014 he illegally annexed the Crimea. His
aggression was rewarded, because we have tolerated these illegal
invasions.
Many western leaders, and the bulk of the western public, have
failed to understand that Ukraine is merely a component of a
long-running hybrid warfare campaign against the west. They fail
to appreciate the extent and nature of Russia’s campaign or the
range of weapons used.
I am following carefully what my hon. Friend has to say and agree
with so much of it. Does he agree that the current Russian
intervention in Kazakhstan is part of a piece? This is Putin
running true to form. Although theoretically it is at the
invitation of a Government that this country recognises,
nevertheless it is likely to be classic Putin and expand into a
long-term intervention, on the flimsy pretext that that country
has a significant ethnic Russian population or one that speaks
Russian.
Indeed, and I will be explaining how these apparently disparate
events are integrated in Russia’s grand strategy.
Beneath the cloak of this military noise and aggressive
disinformation, in recent months—Kazakhstan is another
example—Russia has been testing the west’s response with a
succession of lower-level provocations, and I am afraid that we
have signally failed to convince the Russians that we mind very
much or are going to do very much about them. They have rigged
the elections in Belarus, continued cyber-attacks on NATO allies,
particularly in the Baltic states, and demonstrated the ability
to destroy a satellite in orbit with a missile, bringing space
into the arms race. They continue to develop whole new ranges of
military equipment, including tanks with intelligent armour,
fleets of ice breakers, new generations of submarines, including
a new class of ballistic missile submarine, and the first
hypersonic missiles.
They have carried out targeted assassinations and attempted
assassinations in NATO countries using illegal chemical weapons,
provoked a migration crisis in Belarus to destabilise Ukraine,
and brought Armenia back under Russian control, snuffing out the
democratic movement there. They have claimed sovereignty over 1.2
million square miles of Arctic seabed, including the north pole,
which together contain huge oil and gas and mineral reserves.
This followed the reopening of the northern sea route, with
Chinese co-operation and support from France and Germany, which
also hope to benefit. Meanwhile, the UK has expressed no
intention of getting involved.
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. He has just
outlined some weapons that Russia has developed, but does he
agree that the recklessness with which it has done so makes them
even worse? The nuclear-powered Poseidon torpedo is cooled by
seawater, and they feel that some of their hypersonic missiles
are cooled by the air, so they have no concerns whatsoever about
radioactive contamination from the delivery systems, let alone
the payloads.
My right hon. Friend is completely right. They are ruthless about
pursuing what they regard as their own interests and disregard
any other risk. Indeed, they are very far from being risk-averse,
and the west has been far too risk-averse to compete with that. I
will come to that later, but I thank my right hon. Friend for
reminding us about the Poseidon torpedo, which is a
nuclear-tipped torpedo—another escalation in the arms race.
Russia has also been rearming the Serbs in the western Balkans,
including the Serb armed forces and the police in the Serb
enclave of Bosnia, with the intention of destabilising the
fragile peace that NATO achieved 30 years ago. Russia has stepped
up its activity and influence in north and central Africa and has
even started giving support to Catalan separatists in Spain.
Russia uses its diaspora of super-rich Russian kleptocrats to
influence western leaders and exploit centres such as the City of
London to launder vast wealth for its expatriate clients.
Following the shaming chairmanship of Gazprom assumed by the
former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, so Russia has now
recruited former French Prime Minister François Fillon to become
a board director of the massive Russian petrochemicals company
Sibur, with its headquarters in Moscow. The Russians must have
contempt for us for being so gullible and corruptible. Our
unilateral withdrawal from Kabul also vindicates their narrative
that the west is weak, pointing out that we failed to stand by
our moral principles or our friends.
Closer to home, look at how Gazprom has gradually and quietly
reduced the gas supply to Europe, running down Europe’s gas
reserves and causing prices to spike, leading to quadrupling gas
and electricity prices in the UK. If Putin now chokes off the
supply, it would take time and investment to put in place the
necessary alternatives, which the Russians will seek to
frustrate, as they already have in Algeria. Algeria was in a
position to increase its supply of gas to EU, depending on the
existing pipeline being upgraded, but a successful Russian
influence campaign aimed at Germany and France prevented that
from happening. Gazprom is enjoying its best ever year, so Putin
can not only threaten western Europe’s energy supplies, but get
the west to fund his war against the west.
Moreover, as gas supplies to Germany through Ukraine seem less
reliable, so Germany continues to support Nord Stream 2, the
pipeline that will bypass Ukraine, strengthening Russia’s hold
over both countries immeasurably. At least we have the option of
re-exploiting our gas reserves in the North sea. For as long as
we require gas in our energy mix, we should be generating our
own, not relying on imported gas from Europe.
The hon. Gentleman’s last statement will be very much welcomed by
workers in the gas and oil industry, but was it not also remiss
of the Government a few years ago not to continue with the gas
storage facility in the North sea, which would have provided us
with some resilience? We should also have been working with other
countries to build up their reserves, to diminish the ability of
the Kremlin and Gazprom to blackmail us.
All I can say is, do not start me on the lamentable incoherence
of 20 years of UK energy policy, because it is a disgrace, and
something that we could have done so much better and that this
Government are starting to repair, but it will take some
time.
Will my hon. Friend give way?
I have already given way to my hon. Friend, so I hope he will
forgive me if I do not take up more time.
The constantly high level of Russian military activity in and
around Ukraine and the attention being drawn to it have enabled
the Kremlin to mount a huge disinformation campaign, designed to
persuade the Russian people and the west that NATO is Russia’s
major concern, that somehow NATO is a needless provocation—I am
looking at my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough
( ), because I cannot believe how
wrong he is on this—and that Russian activity is just a response
to a supposed threat from NATO. That is complete rubbish.
The only reason the west is a threat to the regime in Russia is
who we are and what we represent. We are free peoples, who are
vastly more prosperous than most Russians, liberal in outlook,
relatively uncorrupted and democratic. The Russian narrative is
nothing but a mixture of regime insecurity and self-induced
paranoia. Putin feels that Ukraine becoming visibly and
irrevocably part of the western liberal democratic family would
show the Russian population that that path was also open to
Russia as an alternative to Putinism. Let us remind ourselves
that Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014 was provoked not by
Ukraine attempting to join NATO, but by its proposed association
agreement with the EU.
It is crucial to understand that Russia’s hybrid campaign is
conducted like a war, with a warlike strategic headquarters at
the National Defence Management Centre at the old army staff HQ,
where all the elements of the Russian state are represented in a
permanent warlike council, re-analysing, reassessing and revising
plans and tactics. The whole concept of strategy, as understood
and practised by Putin and his colleagues, is as something
completely interactive with what their opponents are doing. It is
not a detailed blueprint to be followed. It is primarily a
measure-countermeasure activity; a research-based operation,
based on real empiricism; an organically evolving struggle; a
continual experiment, where the weapons are refined and even
created during the battle; and where stratagems and tactics must
be constantly adapted; and plans constantly rewritten to take
account of our actions and reactions, ideally pre-empting or
manipulating them. It is also highly opportunistic, which means
that they are thinking constantly about creating and exploiting
new opportunities.
To guide such constant and rapid adaptation, the strategy process
must include feedback loops and learning processes. To enable
that, what the Russians call the hybrid warfare battlefield is,
as they describe it, “instrumented.” It is monitored constantly
by military and civilian analysts in Russia and abroad, by
embassy staff, journalists, intelligence officers and other
collaborators, all of whom feed their observations and
contributions to those implementing the hybrid warfare
operations.
Meanwhile, western Governments such as ours still operate on the
basis that we face no warlike challenges or campaigns. We
entirely lack the capacity or even the will to carry out
strategic analysis, assessment and adequate foresight on the
necessary scale. We lack the strategic imagination that would
offer us opportunities to pre-empt or disrupt the Russian
strategy. We have no coherent body of skills and knowledge to
give us analogous capacity to compete with Russian grand
strategy. Our heads are in the sand. So much of domestic politics
is about distracting trivia, while Russia and others, such as
China, are crumbling the foundations of our global security.
Why does this matter? It matters because our interests, the
global trading system on which our prosperity depends and the
rules-based international order which underpins our peace and
security are at stake. We are outside the EU. We can dispense
with the illusion that an EU common defence and security policy
could ever have substituted for our own vigilance and commitment.
We must acknowledge that while the United States of America is
still the greatest superpower, it has become something of an
absentee landlord in NATO, tending to regard European security
issues as regional, rather than a direct threat to US interests.
Part of UK national strategy must be to re-engage the US fully,
but that will be hard post-Trump. He has left terrible scars on
US politics, and the Biden Administration are frozen by a hostile
Congress, leading to bitter political paralysis. Nevertheless,
the priority must be to reunite NATO.
Having initially refused to have a summit, President Biden has
now provisionally agreed to a meeting with Putin on 9 and 10
January—this weekend—to negotiate what? We all want dialogue, and
the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) speaking from the
Opposition Front Bench earlier said we want dialogue, but it
should not be to discuss the Russian agenda. Being forced to the
table to negotiate that way would be appeasement. It would be
rewarding threats of aggression, which is no different from
giving way to aggression itself. What further concessions can the
west offer without looking like appeasers? The Geneva meetings
have to signal a dramatic shift in the west’s attitude and
resolve, or they will be hailed as a Russian victory.
Some are now comparing the present decade to the 1930s prelude to
world war two, where we eventually found we were very alone. If
we want to avoid that, the UK needs to rediscover what in the
past it has done so well, but it means an end to muddling through
and hoping for the best. We cannot abdicate our own national
strategy to NATO or the US. It means creating our own machinery
of government and a culture in our Government that can match the
capability and determination of our adversaries in every field of
activity.
My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech, and thereby
shortening the one that I will make very considerably. He has
made the comparison with the run-up to the second world war. One
of the key final shocks in that catalogue of disaster was the
unexpected Nazi-Soviet pact. Would the equivalent to that be some
form of Chinese move against Taiwan, which would so distract the
United States as to be the last piece of the jigsaw in the
picture that he is painting of a Russian plan to dominate the
European continent?
I have no doubt that Russia and China are not allies, but they
know how to help each other, and I think my right hon. Friend’s
warning is very timely. As I said earlier, how we deal with
Ukraine will reflect how Russia regards Taiwan and, I suppose,
vice versa.
I was talking about the need to create our machinery of
government and our culture in Government that can match the kind
of strategic decision making that takes place in Moscow. I can
assure the House that there are people inside and outside
Whitehall who are seized of this challenge, and Members will be
hearing more from us in the months ahead.
Madam Deputy Speaker
I hope we can manage this afternoon’s business without a formal
time limit. If everyone speaks for between eight and nine
minutes, we will do so. If people speak for significantly more
than eight minutes, I will have to impose a time limit.
2.19pm
As we made clear earlier, there is considerable concern about the
rapidly deteriorating situation in Ukraine, particularly on its
frontier. In today’s debate, as has been well introduced by the
hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex ( ), we need to look at that on
a much broader spectrum—basically one of a revanchist Russia that
is seeking to rewrite the end of the cold war. It is seeking to
recreate the Soviet Union; to increase its influence, if not its
direct acquisition—I do not think it would rule that out,
however—of the former Soviet Republics; and to establish hegemony
over the former countries of the Warsaw pact, as well as to keep
Finland in a state of neutrality and to have considerable
influence in the western Balkans. That is very clear. Most of
those countries are members of NATO and of the EU, and some of
them are members of both. I think that explains the Kremlin’s
enormous hostility to both those institutions, as it seeks to do
everything it can to undermine them.
We need to recognise the nature of that threat, to which the hon.
Gentleman drew attention very effectively. It is not just a
military threat. We talk about the 100,000 troops on the border,
and that is significant, although there might be a tendency to
overestimate the efficacy of much of Russia’s equipment. Although
Russia may be making advances and developments in hypersonics and
so on, quite a lot of its other equipment—we see this
particularly with its surface fleet—is distinctly substandard. We
need a strong evaluation of that, and that would be much easier
had Whitehall not dispersed so much of its Russia-watching
capability after the fall of the Berlin wall, leaving a great
gap. There may be some attempts to recreate that, but I do not
think we have anything like the ability we once had to observe
and understand what is going on.
That is also tied to integration. The hon. Member described very
well the integrating mechanisms within the system—it is very
reminiscent of the Soviet system during the cold war—to integrate
all areas: cultural life, political life and industrial
espionage, so that they work together in a co-ordinated way. If I
asked the Minister where in Whitehall was the UK’s integration
along those lines—I am not aware of it—I think he would be hard
pressed to put his finger on it. What frustrates me enormously is
that in the past, we had quite a good record on this. During the
second world war, the Political Warfare Executive—headed up,
interestingly enough, by Richard Crossman, subsequently a Labour
Member of Parliament and Labour Minister—pulled together
journalistic and psychological expertise, and it had an extremely
effective record.
I want very briefly to relay two conversations that I have had
about strategic thinking in Government. One was with a person who
is now the former Prime Minister, who said, “Oh, Bernard thinks
we should have a strategy, but I think we should remain
flexible,” completely misunderstanding what strategy is. The
second was with a Minister who is now serving in a very senior
capacity in this Government, and who said, “What is our strategy?
We think we have to work with NATO.” In this country, we are so
far behind understanding what strategy is that we have a very
great task in front of us.
I thank the hon. Gentleman. Of course, many people quote
Eisenhower as saying that all strategic plans break down on first
contact with the enemy. Of course, they forget the next sentence:
nevertheless, it is still necessary to plan, and to have a
framework.
It is also necessary to look at this issue, as our opponents do,
in a broad spectrum to see how all the areas interlink. That is
the problem that we faced for some years with industrial
espionage, for example, although people are waking up to that to
quite a degree. Traditionally, all the way through, there has
been industrial espionage by the Russians, and more recently by
the Chinese, but there has been a reluctance and a failure to see
it in such a way. Many of those who criticise such an approach
say, “You are trying to recreate the cold war.” No, we are not.
The cold war has already been restarted.
As far as I can see, President Putin reanimated a sense of
hostility—people can call it a cold war, or whatever they like—in
his Munich conference speech in 2007. Since then, what has been
so blindingly depressing about western Governments, and
specifically the UK Government, is that we desperately tried,
really until 2014, to pretend that that had not happened. I am
afraid that that just shows that it is better to face the
reality, however uncomfortable it is, than to behave like an
ostrich.
Such behaviour, I am afraid, has been a regular feature.
Everybody should be very clear. Putin only recently described the
break-up of the Soviet Union as
“a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the
Soviet Union”.
We should remember that he previously called its collapse the
“greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Oh that
mine enemy would write a book! He has made it very clear where he
stands, and therefore we have to respond to that effectively. We
look at the troops in Ukraine, and talk about the little green
men. We must also look right the way through the middle east and
north Africa, and indeed further down into Africa. The Wagner
Group is a so-called private sector operation, but it is licensed
by, closely related to and deeply embedded in the Kremlin, and
operates on its behalf and at its behest.
Slightly diverting from the Political Warfare Executive, in the
post-war period under Ernest Bevin the information research
department was created at the Foreign Office, precisely to run a
full spectrum influence war in order to shape opinion in the UK
and more widely in the western world and, as part of that
operation, to look at and operate on the structural weaknesses
within the Soviet bloc. If Soviet communism is an effective way
of seizing power, it is a lousy way of running economies and
societies. We therefore have to take the fight to them.
That is not just about agitation, propaganda and trying to mirror
the disinformation and lies; one of the most effective weapons
against such authoritarian and dictatorial regimes is to tell the
truth about what is going on in their societies. We should always
remember why the Russians, the Chinese and others are so afeared
of their own populations knowing and understanding the truth.
There is ample historical evidence from the last 100 years that
many of those who run such societies and their secret police know
much better than we do how unstable those societies are, and how
thin is the level of support. That does not mean that they are
not dangerous, because one of the ways of trying to mask that is
external adventurism and trying to create the prospect of a
threat abroad.
It has been rightly said that NATO is not an offensive alliance;
it is a defensive alliance. I do not understand—I put this to the
Minister—why we are not providing defensive equipment to the
Ukrainian forces, not in order to take the fight to Russia but to
allow them to defend themselves effectively against any
incursion. Military doctrine should say that the defender has a
significant advantage. We have seen, for example, in a number of
recent conflicts that heavy armour can be severely impacted by
the use of quite cheap drones.
I am not trying to create such an expertise, but merely
questioning whether we are looking at providing defensive
equipment to protect a sovereign country—a country guaranteed by
the Budapest agreement, signed by Russia and ourselves—and why we
are not supporting it in maintaining its independence. This is
also because of the signals to elsewhere in the world, which
others have talked about, such as the other countries formerly in
the Soviet Union, particularly the Baltics, which have been
feeling the pressure both of military exercises and indeed of
intelligence operations for a very considerable period.
I am mindful of your strictures on time, Madam Deputy Speaker,
but I would just like to say this in closing. Some of those
countries will be saying that this is destabilising. Actually, I
think that recognising the nature of the system and being not
aggressive or assertive but robust, while indicating that we
stand by our rights and by our friends and negotiating in a
proper and effective way with the Russians on that basis—not
giving concessions just for having talks, but trying, as we did
in the cold war, to reach containment and a modus vivendi—is the
route ahead. However, that requires robust action, and, in the
words of someone who was involved in those discussions
previously, “Trust, but verify”.
2.31pm
It is a privilege to be called in this debate. I pay tribute to
my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex ( ) for having secured it, and
indeed to the right hon. Member for Warley (), who has elucidated many
points that I know many on all sides share. It is only a shame
that those who were such strong advocates for Putin’s murderous
campaign in Salisbury are not in the Chamber today to defend
their hero. However, we will have to address the issues that they
would have raised anyway, because what we are dealing with here
is not simply a foreign policy challenge—this is not a foreign
adventure or a foreign land about which we know little—but,
fundamentally, a challenge to the British people, the United
Kingdom, our islands, our nations and our communities about how
we defend ourselves in a changed world.
It is Christmas time, and I know many of us have children spoiled
by grandparents who will try to force them in front of things
such as “The Nutcracker” or “Swan Lake”, while we snooze quietly
on the sofa pretending to concentrate, and moments like that
remind us of the Soviet days. At moments of great difficulty,
such as when the Soviet regime was under pressure—when various
geriatric leaders were dying quietly in their beds, surrounded by
even older members of the Politburo finding another one of their
own to replace them—or when the Soviets were worried that coups
were coming and change was imminent, Soviet TV played “Swan
Lake”, “The Nutcracker” and, in fact, anything from
Tchaikovsky.
Christmas will be a reminder for many of us that change is not
necessarily that far away, and we are not alone in thinking that.
Those sitting today in the Kremlin are aware of it. They know
that their position is extremely vulnerable. They know that their
claim to have the support of 70%, 80% or 90% of the local
electorate is complete rubbish. They know that the reality of
their support is very thin. What we are seeing today is not grand
strategy in the sense of trying to do what the Soviets tried to
do or Stalin tried to do, which was to try to move west as far as
the Atlantic or to dominate parts of Africa. This is grand
strategy for the Putin regime in the sense of surviving until
tomorrow morning, then waking up and surviving until the morning
after, and then doing it again and again and again.
This is a very fundamentally flawed regime. We are not really
talking about Russia here; we are talking about a small cabal of
kleptocrats, thieves and liars who have stolen one of the great
countries of the world. It is a country, as I have said, that
gave us so many artists, musicians, scientists, mathematicians
and, indeed, even people who have advanced the life of the
British people with inventions such as graphene, which Manchester
University has done so well to develop. This is an amazing
country. This is a country that really should have a grand
strategy, and that grand strategy should be to invest in
education, in connections and roads, in health and in the people
who have made so much of Europe great, who have brought so many
ideas to the world and who have brought so much joy to many
hearts—not to mine perhaps but to my five-year-old daughter’s, as
she loves the ballet. The problem is that those policies are not
being followed, and they are not being followed for the very
simple reason that they do not enrich the small band of brigands
who sit round the table today. Putin and his 40 thieves sit
there, getting richer and richer.
The latest estimate I have heard, and it is only an estimate, is
that Mr Putin controls somewhere north of the equivalent of $200
billion. Of course that is not all in Russia—a lot of it is
spread around the world—and very sadly, for those who read the
works of Oliver Bullough, Luke Harding, Catherine Belton and many
others, too much of it is here. Too much of it has flowed through
our systems, our pipes, to be laundered, processed and channelled
into areas where it can be redeployed and reused to further the
advances of that same group of thieves.
This is a tragedy, and it is a tragedy for two reasons. One, it
leaves the Russian people enslaved to a mob, the victims of a
corrupt and despotic regime. Two, it is more tragic because the
people we all represent and serve are also victims who are left
damaged by this process. Our own financial system is harmed by
that corruption, our own property networks are exploited by that
corruption, our schools are devalued and our universities are
stripped out. None of it is total, but it is certainly true that
all our systems are damaged by the level of corruption that we
see tolerated by a very small number of people in this country,
and that is wrong.
I was privileged to work with many Members who are in the Chamber
today on the 2018 Foreign Affairs Committee report, “Moscow’s
Gold”, on the spread of dirty Russian money through our
organisations. I was privileged to highlight some of the areas
where we can do better, and we have been discussing how we might
update that report in the coming weeks and months. We know there
is a lot to do, so we will be looking more at where this money is
going. We will be highlighting, as others have today, the
overseas territories. We will be looking, as many others have
highlighted, at how energy projects are used to exploit our
dependence on petrochemicals and our dependence on energy, and to
turn that dependence against us.
Those are the key reasons why this is about us, but there is a
third reason why this is not just about a foreign country or just
about Moscow, and why it is not even just about Kiev and Ukraine,
although we must stand with the courageous individuals who are
today defending their homes against Russian aggression, or rather
Putin’s aggression. The third reason is that there is a direct
link to our interests here. The reality is that the priorities of
our people are, quite rightly, healthcare, education and
transport. The interests that we share rely on having a world
that works within a system of rules that support and defend free
people to exploit their talents and opportunities to grow the
economy, to invest for the future, to plan and to reap what they
sow. What Putin and his regime are doing is what dictators do all
over the world: they shorten the horizon, they cut down
investment angles, they make it harder to develop, they make it
harder to co-operate and collaborate, and they push people over
the border and through illegal migration routes out of fear of
persecution at home. Fundamentally, for our people, we must stand
up with other NATO countries to defend ourselves against what we
are seeing today.
I come back to my initial point. This is not a grand strategy;
this is a cheap trick by a two-bit hustler playing a shi—excuse
me, a shyster’s game. I believe that is acceptable. It is a
shyster’s game that is being witnessed around the world. It is
pretending to be a genuine strategic play, but it is not—it is
not. It is a very, very low-grade trick, but because we have not
stood up, because we have not been willing to be as firm as we
can be, and because we have weakened ourselves with our European
NATO partners and partners around the world, we are seeing
ourselves undermined by it. We can stand up. We can kick out the
dirty money—it is not that much in UK terms. We can, with allies,
defend ourselves. We can stand with the Russian people, and with
great people around the world, and reject this band of thieves
and kleptocrats.
2.40pm
I warmly congratulate the be-knighted Member, the hon. Member for
Harwich and North Essex ( ), on securing this very
important debate.
I suspect I am going to agree with everybody and that everybody
is going to agree wholeheartedly with one another today, but I
think that that is important because it is important that Russia
understands that the UK has a single voice on this matter. I am
absolutely delighted that my political party has now returned to
common sense on these issues. I welcome the new shadow Foreign
Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr
Lammy), and I am delighted that he is here for the whole debate.
If I am honest, I wish that the Foreign Secretary were here,
because this is the kind of debate that the Foreign Secretary
should listen to. Let me start with some things I have said
before. I have been saying some of them for a very long time, and
when they were not very popular things to say in this
Chamber.
In essence, there is a great lie at the heart of Putin’s
strategy. His lie, first of all, is that the west is threatening
Russia. In fact, the first clause of Russian military doctrine
states that the existence of NATO is the greatest threat to the
Russian Federation. That is a lie. Everybody in this Chamber
would agree that NATO is a defensive alliance. There is no
aggressive intention whatever behind our alliance. The second
part of the lie is that Ukraine is oppressing Russians. That is
remarkably similar to what Hitler said about the Sudeten Germans
in the 1930s. It is also a blatant lie. Thirdly, he says that
Russia is interested only in self-defence and auto-determination,
and that that is the policy it tries to advance all around the
world. That is a blatant lie. As we can see in all its
activities, whether in Syria or the Balkans, it is very clear
that Russia is always pursuing its own self-interest.
The last bit of the lie, repeated regularly in particular by
Russian ambassadors to the Court of St James’s, is that everybody
who disagrees with Russia’s attitude on any individual case is a
Russophobe. It is almost an equivalent to antisemitism as far as
they are concerned. That is a lie. Every single person in this
House who takes an interest in Russia does so because we have a
phenomenal respect for the Russian people, their history, their
traditions, their arts and their culture. We only have to go to
Russia for a day to understand what a phenomenal history they
have. Whether we are talking about art, music, poetry or
novelists, they have made such a phenomenal contribution to the
world. None of us in this debate today is a Russophobe. We are
all lovers of the Russian people.
What is actually happening in Russia, rather than Putin’s big
lie, is an aggressive campaign of destabilisation. It takes two
forms. The first is a destabilisation of the democratic west.
This is a repeated theme. It is quite cheap. It is much cheaper
to try to destabilise us rather than to go to war with us. I will
say a little bit more about that later in relation to some of the
secret documents I have obtained from the Kremlin.
The hon. Gentleman is a strong proponent of the European Union
and campaigned for our membership of it; how does he react to
Germany and France bypassing sanctions on Russia and supporting
things such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that clearly undermine
our NATO partners in central and eastern Europe?
I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman about Nord
Stream—indeed, I regularly try to berate British Government
Ministers for not being robust enough and decisive enough on that
issue. My anxiety about our having left the European Union is
that there is a danger, in respect of the Europeans’ common
security and defence policy, that they will renege on the kind of
policies that we would like to see. I would like us to find a way
of still sitting at the table so that we can influence such
decisions. The Spanish Prime Minister once said to me that one
problem with the EU maintaining its sanctions regime was that
once Britain—frankly, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs
May)—was no longer in the room, everybody started to fracture
apart. I come to the same conclusion as the hon. Gentleman but
from a different perspective.
Others have talked about the pattern of behaviour, about South
Ossetia and Abkhazia, about the problems in North Macedonia and
Catalunya, about the destabilisation in the United States of
America and, of course, about the invasion of Crimea, as well as
about the recent problems in Montenegro. All that is, of course,
a deliberate distraction from the real problems of the Russian
economy. I say that because I have a copy of a document—as does
the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (); he may refer to it
later—signed by President Putin himself on 22 January 2016. It
clearly outlines Russia’s strategic aims. First, it notes the
falling incomes of Russian people which, it says, could lead to
significant social tension. It also notes the positive effect of
the invasion of Crimea and the policy in the Donbass region on
public opinion in Russia, but points out that that positive
effect has been only temporary and may not last.
The document suggests that, consequently, Russia has to engage in
a process of influencing other states in the world, particularly
the United States of America and western democracies. It says it
should do this, first, by the provocation of the emergence of a
sociopolitical crisis in the United States of America; secondly,
by the delegitimisation in the public consciousness of the state
system in western democracies; thirdly, by instilling an internal
social split in order to facilitate a general increase in the
radicalisation of society in western democracies; and fourthly,
by provoking the emergence of and strengthening non-traditional
communities in the United States, with ideological focuses
ranging from extremely right to extreme left but always with one
message: they do not hear us. That is precisely what the Russian
state has been doing for the past few years in the United States
of America and in every western democracy, including the United
Kingdom.
I know that the Intelligence and Security Committee looked at
this issue, although I do not think it had that document. I do
not understand why, when our own Intelligence and Security
Committee has recommended changes in this policy area and the
proper investigation of attempts to try to destabilise the
British political system, the Government have simply refused to
do so.
Frankly, we have been getting our policy on Russia wrong for two
decades now. We vacillate and send off mixed messages all the
time. We look weak and indecisive. We look as if we need Russia,
rather than the other way round. We constantly make ourselves the
supplicants—the demandeurs: “Please, don’t do that, Mr Putin.
Please don’t do that!”
We tempt Russian oligarchs to the United Kingdom with easy visas:
we had these golden visas that largely went to extremely wealthy
oligarchs who had made their money corruptly in Russia, with no
questions asked other than, “Do you have enough money?” We did
not even ask, “Are you going to invest it in the United Kingdom?”
We boast about our clever lawyers and accountants who can tidy
things up so that assets are protected, however they have been
obtained. We open up our high-end housing market to Russian
billionaires even though we know that the best way to squirrel
away a dirty fortune or, indeed, to launder £20 million is to buy
a property that is worth £10 million for £20 million. Yes, £10
million is lost, but we have managed to clean up £10 million.
That is precisely what has affected the London housing market so
deleteriously. We even grant—Government Ministers do this—some
Russian individuals anonymity in what is meant to be the public
register in Companies House of beneficial ownership of
companies.
The hon. Member is, as always, making an excellent speech. He is
talking about all the corrupt and corrupting facilitators in our
society. Is he as concerned as I am by the use by Putin allies of
very high-end libel lawyers to try to silence former Members of
this House and people such as Catherine Belton who are trying to
expose what Putin allies are doing in the west?
Absolutely. It is a real problem for us that the British libel
courts end up being used to effectively silence dissent and the
truth about Russia. Catherine Belton’s book is an absolute
belter. I believe every single word of it to be true and I
wholeheartedly support her campaign, which, in the end, is a
campaign on behalf of the Russian people to ensure that Russia’s
wealth is for the Russian people, not a few kleptocrats.
Our implementation of all the “Moscow’s Gold” report is long
overdue, as referred to by the Chair of the Foreign Affairs
Committee. That means that we must have a public register of
beneficial ownership that should apply to the owners of overseas
companies operating or purchasing property in the United Kingdom.
That still does not exist; I simply do not understand why.
The unexplained wealth orders seem to have fallen on stony ground
and do not seem to be much use because there is a great
difficulty in implementing them, so they need to be reviewed. We
need to ensure that the overseas territories do not become a soft
backyard where people can hide vast amounts of money corruptly,
effectively under the British banner. That is not a patriotic
commitment by the overseas territories. The patriotic commitment
that the overseas territories should be making to Britain is to
put public beneficial ownership registers in place as soon as
possible.
Of course, we have to co-operate entirely with NATO and our
allies in the United States of America, but we also have to take
seriously the rest of the European Union. If Europe fractures on
the issue, Russian territorial aggression will get worse rather
than better. Russia will continue to think that we are weak,
gullible and easily bought off unless we adopt a single clear,
robust, serious and consistent posture that applies to dirty
money, human rights abuses and territorial aggression.
2.52pm
I join other hon. Members in congratulating my hon. Friend the
Member for Harwich and North Essex ( ) on securing this important
debate on strategy, which we do not do as well as we should. At
the moment, we are tactically responsive and react to events
rather than shaping them and looking over the horizon.
Strategy is all about having an objective to maintain or alter
the status quo using available means and, indeed, willing
alliances. The plan is about how to achieve that outcome with
energy policy, weapons treaties, cyber resilience and
capabilities, the use of sanctions, our defence posture, what we
want to spend on our military might, and the friendships that we
then wish to stretch out and advance, such as with Ukraine.
When it comes to strategy, having worked in the Foreign,
Commonwealth and Development Office and the Ministry of Defence,
it is clear that we can and must do better, given what is coming
over the horizon. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric,
once wrote that
“when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower
than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only
question is when.”
To transfer that to the world’s activities today, our world is
moving very fast and we in the UK, and in the west more widely,
are not keeping up. I would argue that that change is happening
10 times faster than in the industrial revolution of the late
18th and 19th centuries, at 100 times the scale and with 1,000
times the impact.
This timely debate on strategically understanding and responding
to the security threat from Russia centres on the three core
themes that I have progressively promoted in this Chamber for
some time: first, the increased disunity and timidity of the
west; secondly, the rising influence of authoritarian states
exploiting that timidity to ruthlessly pursue their agendas; and
thirdly, the increasingly technological digital world and our
ability to continuously adapt and harness the changing character
of conflict.
Given my right hon. Friend’s experience of working in both
Departments, what meetings does he think are taking place daily
in Government on a cross-departmental basis in response to the
crisis and generally to monitor what Russia does?
Mr Ellwood
I will explore that in more detail. Certainly, our gathering of
the intelligence picture is second to none—we do that extremely
well indeed—but today I will make an argument about our appetite
to step forward and fill the vacuum that, I am afraid, has been
temporarily left by the United States.
To go back to the three key themes, first, we have the state of
the west. I believe that in the last decade we witnessed the high
tide mark of post-cold war western liberalism. That is quite a
statement to make in this Chamber. Since 9/11, a new form of
asymmetric warfare has dominated western attention, but it has
distracted us from the international rules-based order and
recognising and supporting the importance of bolstering and
updating the rules that we want to follow, which we earned after
the second world war. We have not kept up with shifting power
bases, new technologies and emerging threats.
As I alluded to, the United States—the one country that we look
to for leadership—is missing in action, distracted and polarised
by what is happening in its domestic scene. That is likely to get
worse with the coming mid-terms.
rose—
Mr Ellwood
I will not give way, as I have already done so once and I am
conscious of the time.
The United States has temporarily retreated from the global
stage, and there is a gap on the world stage for leadership that
Britain should and—I hope—could fill.
Secondly, we have the rising influence of authoritarian states.
Our adversaries are taking advantage of our weakness and becoming
bolder, more confident and more assertive. They sense the west’s
weakness. That is why we saw Putin not hesitate to invade Georgia
and the Crimea as he sought to strike back in concern about
NATO’s growing membership of former Warsaw pact countries. Such
countries have joined both NATO and the EU. Retaliatory sanctions
were of course imposed, but, given our reliance on Russia’s oil
and gas, their impact was limited.
Finally, as other hon. Members have touched on, we have the
fast-changing character of conflict, which Russia is excelling
at. The strategic context that we face today is increasingly
complex, dynamic and competitive. We face constant political
warfare designed to erode our economic, political and social
cohesion. Russia’s goal is to win without war fighting: to break
our willpower and harness attacks below the threshold that would
normally warrant a war fighting response. Russia excels at
constant political conflict, deception, economic coercion,
cyber-interference, large-scale disinformation and manipulation
of elections, all underpinned by strong-arm tactics and military
intimidation. That is what hybrid war looks like.
I argue that any threat can be measured by a simple formula: the
product of the ability and intention to engage minus our ability
and commitment to defend ourselves and our interests. During the
cold war, Russia backed down over Cuba knowing that the United
States would not turn a blind eye. But Russia’s ability to engage
in conflict has dramatically improved in the last decade. It has
made significant investments in all three of its military
services—its army, air force and navy—as well as spilling out
into the weaponisation of space, hypersonic missiles, as have
been mentioned, and cyber capabilities. It is also developing a
worrying alliance with China, sharing protocols and
doctrines.
We need to understand Russia’s desire to engage and cause
conflict. That requires an appreciation of its leader. Putin has
long held the view that the west is to blame for the demise of
the Soviet Union, not least because the privatisation of Russia’s
nationalised industries saw so much Russian money leaving the
country for the west. He believes that the west deliberately
seeks to keep Russia weak; his goal since coming to power has
therefore been to revive Russia as a global power that will again
command respect from the west. Putin has long held the view that
the west is to blame for the demise of the Soviet Union, not
least because the privatisation of Russia’s nationalised
industries saw so much Russian money leaving the country for the
west. He believes that the west deliberately seeks to keep Russia
weak; his goal since coming to power has therefore been to revive
Russia as a global power that will again command respect from the
west.
Putin’s strategy is very clear indeed. First, he needed to secure
his own domestic power base by silencing his critics, controlling
the message and providing an enemy for the nation to rally
against. That is straight from the authoritarianism playbook:
procure an external enemy on which domestic shortfalls can be
blamed, and against which the population can rally when fed
propaganda via state-controlled media. With that largely
achieved, his second mission is to return Russia to superpower
status, using its well-harnessed grey zone skillsets to expand
Russia’s influence to counter the expansion of NATO and the
European Union, specifically focusing on the Russian-speaking
diasporas in neighbouring states.
Last month, an ever-confident Putin went further, effectively
declaring that he wanted a new Warsaw pact to turn back
history—back to the USSR. His ultimatum to the west starts with
the obvious—the renunciation of any further enlargement of NATO
to the east—but then demands that the US withdraw its protection
from the 14 eastern European and Balkan states that have become
members of NATO in the last 24 years.
All this, of course, is unacceptable to the west and to NATO
members, which makes the prospect of an invasion ever more
likely. That is the immediate threat to Ukraine. After the loss
of the former Ukrainian President, Putin’s ally, it was clear
that Ukraine would eventually join both NATO and the EU, which
would see the western organisations rubbing up against the
Russian border. That, for Putin, was unacceptable.
Let us put ourselves in Putin’s shoes. Would there be a better
time to invade eastern Ukraine than right now? Over time, Ukraine
will rearm and move closer to the west, making any invasion more
of a challenge. That is why there are not just 100,000 infantry
on the border, but special forces, field hospitals and missile
systems—way beyond what would be needed just as a leveraging chip
in discussions with the United States.
Russia is aware of the financial sanctions, but they will be
limited because any impact on Russia will also affect its trading
partners. Russia will, of course, retaliate with its energy
provision to Europe, and in the long term it will simply expedite
a closer relationship with China.
This is about more than just Ukraine. Russia is restoring its
authoritarian clout in the international arena to the point that
it is able to dictate its own terms in shaping the international
community. It would not have taken NATO much hardware to deter
Russia and make Putin think twice. I hear the argument that NATO
is a defensive organisation and Ukraine is not a member, but that
is a simplistic view of the threat picture, with potentially
grave consequences for eastern European security, and it will
embolden other authoritarian regimes to pursue their agendas to
expand their own influence.
Where does that leave the west and the UK? We need to wake up and
recognise just how fragile and dangerous our world has become. A
question that I pose regularly to this House is whether we think
the world will be more or less stable in the next five years; we
know the answer. We have so many fires that have been left
unextinguished—for example in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan,
Yemen and even Bosnia and Kashmir, where governance and security
are starting to erode and fail. The bigger geopolitical threats,
of course, are Russia and China. With two Presidents for life
sitting in Moscow and Beijing with more power and time than they
know what to do with, it is obvious that we must wake up to this
crunch point in our history.
How we in the west conduct ourselves over the next five years
could determine how the next five decades play out. If America
chooses to step back, it does not mean that Britain should do the
same. We are a nation that steps forward when others hesitate, as
our history illustrates. If we do not, who will? That does not
mean that we do all the heavy lifting, but our hard and soft
power assets remain strong. What we are missing is the appetite
once again to play a more influential role and offer the
statecraft and thought leadership that the west is currently
missing.
I make it very clear: we need a reality check. We need to stop
kidding ourselves that we garner so much influence as senior
members of the United Nations Security Council, NATO, the G7 and
the Commonwealth, when those very organisations no longer harbour
the clout or the vision to handle our modern and complex world.
Power bases and alliances are shifting fast, but we seem to be in
denial. The west needs to quickly remind itself what it stands
for, what it believes in and what it is willing to defend.
To conclude, we need a Russia strategy. Our current trajectory on
Russia is to see it slide progressively ever closer to China. I
make the bigger point that this will be China’s century. How the
world adapts to that is a whole other debate, but as we debate
today what Russia is doing, would it not be easier to contest and
challenge where China is going if we turned Russia 180° over the
next decade, so that it is closer to the west than it is to the
east? That would be a strategy that I think we could all agree
with.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. We are not doing very well on the eight to nine minutes,
so I am afraid I will have to put on a time limit of eight
minutes—which is quite a long time.
3.05pm
At the beginning of March 1946, less than a week before Churchill
delivered his iron curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, the joint
intelligence sub-committee of the chiefs of staff concluded:
“The long-term aim of the Russian leaders is to build up the
Soviet Union into a position of strength and greatness fully
commensurate with her vast size and resources.”
The JIC admitted that firm intelligence was difficult to obtain,
as
“Decisions are taken by a small group of men, the strictest
security precautions are observed, and far less than in the case
in the Western Democracies are the opinions of the masses taken
into account.”
Whilst
“likely to be deterred by the existence of the atomic bomb”,
of which the Americans then had a temporary monopoly,
“in seeking a maximum degree of security, Russian policy will be
aggressive by all means short of war.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “In brief,” the JIC warned
“although the intention may be defensive, the tactics will be
offensive, and the danger always exists that Russian leaders may
misjudge how far they can go without provoking war with America
or ourselves.”
That was in 1946. Here we are, many decades later, but one can
see resonances and the relevance of that analysis to the
situation that we face today.
We have had two excellent speeches from Labour Back Benchers—I am
only sorry that there are not more Opposition Members here,
although I am hopeful that, if there were, they would have been
largely singing from the same song sheet. However, it is one
thing for us all to agree on a bipartisan basis on the analysis
of what is wrong and quite another for us to be able to take
steps to ensure the safety of the west, which seems to be
imperilled rather more than at any time I can think of since at
least the 1980s, when there was a huge movement to try and disarm
the west of nuclear weapons unilaterally. What are we going to
do, what steps are we going to take, and have we got confidence
in the leadership of the western world to stand up for the values
that seem to be common to all participants so far in this
debate?
We have heard a masterly summary of the way in which Russia has
been issuing ultimata to the west that are truly extraordinary. I
must make a slight disclaimer at this point and say that I am
speaking entirely in my capacity as a former Chairman of the
Defence Committee, and certainly not as the current Chairman of
the Intelligence and Security Committee. Nothing that I say in
this debate is predicated on anything that I have read, heard or
discussed in that more recent capacity.
What I am about to say is the same message that so many of us
have been trying to put forward for many years, which is that
there is no real defence for Europe without the involvement of
the United States. I was very interested to hear the remarks of
my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex ( ) about the fact that people
should not denigrate the cold war. The cold war was a strategic
success for democracy. There were two alternatives to the cold
war: one was surrender and the other was nuclear war, so of those
three, I think I know which was the preferential outcome. I also
agree with the earlier observation that all the talk about grey
zone warfare, and all the rest of it, is a sign that we are
already involved in a cold war. It is a good thing, if we are
faced by adversaries, to confront them, to stand up to them, and
hopefully to prevent that from escalating into an open war: a hot
war; all-out conflict.
How best can we do that? Well, it worked rather well from the
mid-1940s until the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in
1991. It was a mixture of two concepts: deterrence and
containment. Deterrence involved two main elements: the
involvement of the US, as I said, in European security, and the
fact that there was a nuclear umbrella that might not deter all
forms of aggression but could certainly protect us from nuclear
blackmail. The point about containment is that, if you are not
going to go to war with your adversary but you want to stop him
taking you over and destroying your way of life, then you have to
be prepared to hold him in check for decades on end. What a pity
that somebody did not explain this recently to President Biden,
who kept talking about “forever wars”. Are the Americans involved
in a forever war in South Korea? Should they withdraw their
limited military presence from South Korea? What do we think
would happen then?
Surely that is exactly the wrong analogy. In Korea there is a
stalemate and there are two societies. That is very different
from fighting a forever guerrilla war in unfavourable territory.
It is more about President Biden’s predecessor, who gave
everything away to the Taliban in the same way that he encouraged
Putin.
Dr Lewis
All analogies are risky and no analogies are perfect, but in one
sense my analogy stands up: if North Korea now knew that America
would not be prepared to go on indefinitely defending South
Korea, does one honestly think that South Korea would have much
of a future in the face of the regime that it faces across that
parallel? Of course it would not.
I am not being partisan about this, because I believe that we are
speaking on the very anniversary of ex-President Trump’s
disgraceful behaviour in relation to the riots and the invasion
of the Capitol, but I am very concerned that we are now faced
with the prospect of someone who is manifestly not up to the job
of taking on a ruthless, villainous gangster like Vladimir Putin
and is going in to negotiate with him on the basis of an
ultimatum put forward by Putin that effectively states that the
NATO alliance has a take-it-or-leave-it offer: either it
withdraws all its troops from the territory of any country that
has joined NATO since the end of the cold war or it faces the
prospect of military action in Europe. I believe that the great
American people and the great American political system depend on
more than any individual in the top job, but all I can say is
that, if there are wise strategists around President Biden, they
had better brief him a lot better, a lot more quickly and in a
lot more depth than they did in the run-up to the disastrous
unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan.
3.15pm
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North
Essex ( ) on obtaining this timely
debate on this extremely important subject. I want to start by
making it clear, as one or two others have done, that we have no
quarrel with the Russian people. Indeed, we have a considerable
history with and affection for them. That dates back to the time
of Queen Victoria, and since then this country has supported
Russia. Immediately before the revolution, the Anglo-Russian
Hospital was established, in which my father served as a medical
orderly, first in Petrograd, as it was then called, and then on
the eastern front immediately prior to the revolution. In the
second world war, this country supported the Arctic convoys,
which supplied essential food to the Russian people, with the
loss of 85 merchant ships and 16 Royal Navy warships. I am glad
that the Russian Government have more recently acknowledged that
by awarding medals to those who survived.
When I worked with Margaret Thatcher, I saw the establishment of
her relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev. He saw that the system
over which he presided was flawed and would ultimately fail.
History should give him credit for the fact that when the Soviet
Union began to break up and Lithuania became the first Soviet
country to declare independence, Gorbachev decided not to release
the troops from their barracks. As a result, those countries
obtained independence. All of that has changed and deteriorated
under Vladimir Putin, as has already been set out.
There was a brief time when there were signs of hope. Those who
have read the book by Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to
Russia, on the attempt by the Obama Administration to obtain what
they called “reset” will recall that there was a brief period
when it appeared that things were becoming slightly more liberal.
That did not last. It was principally when Medvedev was
President, but things deteriorated very quickly when Putin came
back as President. Indeed, Mr McFaul was then declared persona
non grata in Russia. Since then, there has been ruthless
suppression.
The first victims of Putin are the Russian people. The strategy,
which my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex and
others have described, is multi-faceted and pursued on a number
of fronts, but it is firstly a ruthless suppression of any
opposition or dissent within Russia itself. That extends as far
as murder. We have seen Boris Nemtsov killed and Alexei Navalny
poisoned and detained in a corrective labour camp. In this
country, we have seen the murder of Alexander Litvinenko and the
attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, which led to the death of a
British citizen, Dawn Sturgess. There are suggestions that a
number of other deaths in this country are linked to the
activities of the Russian security services.
There has also been massive suppression of human rights. Most
recently, Memorial, the international human rights organisation,
has been closed down by the courts. My own particular area of
interest has always been media freedom. Media freedom does not
exist in Russia. A recent assessment by Reporters Without Borders
has stated:
“With draconian laws, website-blocking, Internet cuts and leading
news outlets reined in or throttled out of existence, the
pressure on independent media has grown steadily”.
There are currently 373 journalists imprisoned in Russia.
Then there is the strategy adopted towards Russia’s neighbours.
Mention has been made of the occupation of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia in Georgia, Transnistria in Moldova, and of course
Crimea and Donbass in Ukraine, and threats are made to
neighbours. When I was in Lithuania, we were shown the Suwalki
gap, the short stretch of land along the Polish border linking
Belarus and Kaliningrad, which is under Russian occupation—it is
part of Russia itself. If the Suwalki gap were taken, it would
cut off all three Baltic states completely from the west. There
are already reports of migrants being driven into that gap, which
some fear is such an attempt.
Of course, it is Ukraine that is currently in the frontline. It
committed the cardinal sin of wanting to move towards becoming a
more free and democratic society, and when Yanukovych attempted
to suppress that, the Ukrainian people turned out in their
thousands to protest, and 100 died under sniper fire in the
Maidan. Shortly after that, Putin occupied Crimea. He first
denied that he had any responsibility—the famous little green
men—but subsequently he celebrated it. That was followed by the
activity in the Donbass region, and of course there was then the
appalling murder of 283 passengers and 15 civilian crew members
who died when MH17 was shot down as part of that. Putin now is
pursuing a policy in the Donbass of issuing passports; over
600,000 have been given to Ukrainian citizens within the Donbass
region. As President Zelensky has pointed out, that was the
precursor strategy used in Crimea. I visited, with , the two ports of Berdyansk
and Mariupol on the sea of Azov, which have now been cut off as a
result of the building of the bridge across the Kerch strait,
which allows Russia to squeeze those ports and stop any shipping
going through.
Ukraine is on the frontline. We heard the Foreign Secretary’s
very welcome statement earlier today. However, as I suggested
earlier, the threat of massive consequences is extremely
unspecific and at the moment the only concrete statement made by
the Government as to the precise results of any Russian military
action against Ukraine was the statement by the Secretary of
State for Defence that it was “highly unlikely” that anyone was
going to send troops.
I agree that Ukraine is not a NATO member at present and I do not
think there will be great willingness to deploy military troops,
but we need to do far more in terms of military assistance and
setting out very clearly the consequences of Russia’s current
tactic, which is not just to threaten Ukraine but to repress its
own people internally and pursue an aggressive strategy of
expansion outside.
Putin respects strength, but currently we are not showing much. I
fully endorse the call of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich
and North Essex and others that we need a clear strategy to
demonstrate to him that we cannot accept the current behaviour of
the Russian Government.
3.23pm
As the leader of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe, I
have a major problem: we have to deal with the Russians all the
time, almost on a daily basis. The question I have asked, and to
which I have not received a proper answer from anyone, is how we
should deal with them, and in a way that takes the debate
further. We as a delegation have spent our time hassling the
Russian members by challenging their credentials and making life
very uncomfortable for them, but the question I have above all of
that is this: why is Russia so bothered about being a member of
the Council of Europe; about being a member of a multilateral
organisation that, as we have already heard, it does not really
want to be part of? I can think of a number of reasons, but I am
not sure they are adequate. I can think of reasons such as giving
it the ability to interfere in other countries in a way that it
would not otherwise have. If that is the reason, why does it put
up with us and others in the Council of Europe making life
fundamentally uncomfortable?
From my perspective, it is important that the members of the
delegation know something about issues before we go over to
meetings of the Council. I arranged two discussion groups, one
with a leading service person who is one of our service’s chief
Russia experts, and another with a leading dissident. One of the
key messages of the leading service person was that we should not
continue simply to hassle and harass Russia, which was a wasted
opportunity; we should instead use the opportunity to gather
intelligence from the Russians on what their real objectives
were.
I have tried that on a number of occasions. My life in doing so
has been difficult, because some of those people are not the sort
with whom one might like to have conversations in the normal
course of a general and friendly discourse—some are really ugly
characters. Nevertheless, we make an effort to do that, and it is
important to try to get to grips with what the Russians are doing
and what the thinking behind them is.
One of the other key messages of that service person was not to
look at Russia from a western perspective, but to buy an atlas
produced in Russia. If we looked at that, we would see that the
Russian perspective is very different from the perspective of
Russia that we would get from looking at a western atlas. Putting
Russia at the centre of those atlases shows, among other things,
how important the Arctic is to Russian thinking and to their
strategic objectives.
The other person we invited over was a leading dissident,
Vladimir Kara-Murza. He has been poisoned twice in Russia. I came
across him at the Council of Europe when we were both attacking
Belarus on the issue of the forced landing of the Ryanair flight
from Athens to Lithuania. I got on well with him and thought it
would be a good idea to invite him to speak, as a counter to the
clear messages we had from the service chief.
The leading dissident put a lot of stress on the fact that, as
has been mentioned in the debate, the support that Putin has in
Russia is very thin and that one of the chief motivations for
Putin is to justify to his own people how he has managed to
change the Russian constitution to allow him to stand for
election again. That was not allowed in the past and, apparently,
Putin is nervous about that. Vladimir Kara-Murza, being a
Muscovite himself, spoke about how, travelling around Russia to
have meetings, it was impossible to tell whether he was in Moscow
or somewhere else, because the level of dissidence was the same
across the whole of Russia. That is an important point to make in
analysing what is going on, and why it is so.
We asked Vladimir Kara-Murza why he thought that Putin had
supported Belarus. He said, “They are the last two dictators left
in Europe, and if one of them goes, it makes the position of the
other more dangerous—more critical.” I thought that was
interesting, because we might have taken the view that if one of
them went, the other would just continue, but so nervous is Putin
of being the last dictator in Europe that he chose to support
Belarus.
So where does that leave us? It leaves me asking the same
question about what we should do. I was interested to hear the
comment from my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East
(Mr Ellwood) that we do not have an overall strategy for dealing
with Russia, and certainly, in my experience, that is exactly the
position that we are in. It leaves us facing a significant
military power, but one, I think, that is slightly weakened by
the fact that it still wants to participate in these multilateral
organisations. I have a clear idea of what the international
order should be and what it should consist of, and I try to make
sure that I continue with that objective in the Council of
Europe. Does this situation make Russia more or less dangerous? I
think that it makes it more dangerous, and from that perspective
this debate is very useful.
3.31pm
Under Vladimir Putin, Russia is obviously testing the west, and
we can rest assured that nothing of significance done by Russia
will happen without Putin’s agreement. I am sure many Members
will agree with me that from the Kremlin’s point of view, it is
already at war with the west; we just do not recognise that. It
considers war to consist of all elements of society pointing
towards the west to get what they want. It is not a grey area;
the Russians just slide into war, whereas we would expect some
sort of declaration of it.
Because of my background, I am particularly interested in what
happens in eastern Europe, and I declare that interest again. I
visit Bosnia relatively frequently, and there is no doubt that
Russia is fully supporting Republika Srpska’s bid to break up
Bosnia. That is very dangerous for Europe. Indeed, it is highly
likely that Putin has authorised Serbia to send weapons to
Republika Srpska.
I was also detained in Crimea in 2005. During my involuntary
extended visit to the area, I was somewhat worried when I was
told just how many of my jailors were talking Russian. The
warders were clearly Russian. I was surprised by that, because
Crimea was still, then, very much a part of Ukraine. After the
annexation of Crimea by the Russians in 2014, a referendum was
held with—they claim—an 83% turnout, in which, apparently, 97% of
voters supported the region’s being integrated back into Russia.
Although we may question whether the referendum was fair, on the
basis of my limited experience of being incarcerated in
Crimea—when I was up to good, by the way, not bad—I am pretty
sure that most people in Crimea are very content to be Russian;
and, given the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s position in Sevastopol,
I cannot see Crimea ever being returned to Ukraine, because the
locals just do not want it.
Eastern Europe is a perfect playground for Putin, in which he can
irritate and taunt us. For our part, we are rather hamstrung,
particularly in Ukraine. Ukraine is not a part of NATO—we have
established that—although it has been a member of the Partnership
for Peace since 1994. Indeed, I remember in that year, when I had
the grand title of chief of policy at Supreme Headquarters Allied
Powers Europe—doesn’t that sound great?—having dealings, for the
first time, with its armed forces. There is no article 5
commitment to defend the territorial integrity of the country,
but, as we have all discussed this afternoon, what happens there
really matters to the rest of us in Europe. The trouble is that
Europe is divided on this issue, again as we have discussed, and
the United States is distracted by China. How about the doomsday
scenario? China moves in on Taiwan at the same time as the
Russians move in on Ukraine. Guess who will be hamstrung? It will
be the United States.
A lot of European Union countries are heavily dependent on
Russian gas and, as I just mentioned, the Americans are fixated
by Chinese expansionism into the Pacific area. In truth, we in
the United Kingdom have been very good friends to Ukraine. We
have given it economic support and, through Operation Orbital,
have provided considerable military training. As the European
Union is so divided on what should be done, the United Kingdom
can play a pivotal role in trying to sort out the problem—by that
I mean trying to stem Putin’s aggressive foreign policy.
We could lead on getting co-ordinated European action against
Putin. It is totally unacceptable that Germany, obviously fearing
Russian retaliation of stopping gas supplies, refuses to allow
the sale of defensive weapons to Ukraine. We have discussed that
we should increase those defensive weapons. It worries me too
that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham
() keeps jumping up to
mention, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline really puts such
countries as Poland and Ukraine in a Catch-22 situation. I was
very pleased when, earlier today, the Foreign Secretary announced
that we categorically do not support Nord Stream 2, but what does
that mean? The answer is not very much, because it looks as if it
will go ahead anyway.
After the Salisbury poisonings, Europe worked collectively in
punishing Russia. We got some sort of joint action. That was a
signal of success and it worked. Surely we should be up to acting
collectively to impose hard-hitting economic sanctions on Russia,
if Putin continues to push his luck in Ukraine, the rest of
Europe, and especially, from my point of view, Bosnia. I have
achieved a strategic success, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I
have finished in less than seven minutes.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Thank you. I call .
3.37pm
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this
timely debate, which the Backbench Business Committee should be
commended for granting so early in the new year and which was so
ably introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and
North Essex ( ).
To start as I mean to go on, I fear that the European skies are
now darkening, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the
winter weather. Perhaps I might explain why. When I was enjoying
war studies at King’s under Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman many
years ago, I learned that during the cold war the Soviets often
referred to the concept of the correlation of forces—effectively
a comparison of strengths and weaknesses, both political and
military, between opposing blocs. If we adopt that conceptual
approach, at least for the purposes of this debate, what does the
current coalition of forces look like, specifically between NATO
and Russia, particularly when viewed from Moscow?
Without wishing to be unkind, the United States has an ageing
President with isolationist tendencies whose popularity is now
waning barely a year into the job. In addition, only a year ago
the American Parliament, Congress, was stormed by its own
citizens—admittedly in bizarre circumstances, but it was
overwhelmed nevertheless. The United States, once the proud
leader of the western democracies and advocate of the Pax
Americana, now seems increasingly absorbed by its own internal
divisions—more worried by the politics of identity than those of
global security.
The growing obsession of the American strategic community with
China may arguably be unwelcome in Beijing, but I suspect that it
is very welcome in Moscow. As just one simple example of that,
despite the presidential election being 14 months ago, and
regardless of the UK traditionally being America’s strongest and
most consistent ally in NATO, the United States has still not
formally appointed a new ambassador to the Court of St James’s to
replace the popular and charismatic Woody Johnson. Do we really
believe that these signals just go completely unnoticed
elsewhere?
How about some of the other major NATO allies—how are they
perceived in the east? For many years during the cold war when
the Berlin wall was up, the German armed forces were highly
operationally capable, held at high readiness and poised to
vigorously resist any incursion by Warsaw pact forces across the
inner German border. Today, despite the wall having come down,
Germany’s armed forces are a shadow of their former selves, with
severe equipment problems and worryingly low levels of
operational availability. Politically, the long-standing and
relatively stable Merkel era is now over. The former German
Chancellor, a fluent Russian speaker, who reportedly had a strong
personal relationship with President Putin, has now been replaced
by a new and inexperienced traffic light coalition, including a
pacifist Green party drag anchor that is unlikely to countenance
any meaningful German military reform. Moreover, Germany
continues selfishly to pursue a “beggar thy neighbour” energy
policy sympathetic to Nord Stream 2, making it potentially even
easier for Russia to deploy the gas weapon.
France, another key NATO member, with high readiness and military
capabilities analogous to those of the UK—including, crucially,
its own independent nuclear deterrent—is largely absorbed with
the forthcoming presidential election this spring. The outcome of
that election is highly uncertain, but some of the candidates,
such as Éric Zemmour, who in 2013 declared Vladimir Putin as his
own man of the year, worry me.
Overall, NATO, the most successful defensive alliance in history,
which the Soviet Union once respected and even feared, has
recently been defeated in Afghanistan, much as its Soviet
forebears were many years ago. Despite all the emphasis on
satellite technology, multi-domain operations, artificial
intelligence, the integrating operating concept and all the other
buzzword bingo that peppers the MOD’s lexicon these days, NATO
was still defeated for all the world to see. Indeed, for all its
supposedly dazzling advanced technology, NATO was ultimately run
out of town by “a bunch of country boys” without an ability to
fight credibly in four of the five established domains—space,
cyber, air or sea—and armed mainly with AK-47s, Motorola radios
and RPGs.
That outcome has surely not gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing,
nor indeed in Tehran. While the west indulges in paralysis by
analysis, the Russians build more tanks, tactical and strategic
aircraft and hypersonic missiles and renew their nuclear arsenal.
As the Defence Committee, on which I serve, has highlighted many
times before, we need to be spending more on defence in this
country, not less. Moreover, weighed down with covid-related debt
and with international gas spot prices now at near record levels,
and despite frequent entreaties from the United States as the
leader of the alliance, the majority of NATO members still do not
meet even the basic target of spending at least 2% of GDP on
defence, with Germany at only around 1.7% this year, and Spain
barely at even 1%.
Given all that, the correlation of forces is now moving in
Moscow’s favour, at least in its eyes, and that smacks of
opportunity. The recent presentation of a draft security treaty
by Russia to western nations—primarily to the United States—has
to be seen in that context. Accompanied by the overt pressure on
Ukraine, which does not possess an article 5 guarantee, were that
treaty to succeed, the next step will probably be to exert
pressure on countries, some of which contain significant ethnic
Russian minority populations which do possess such a guarantee,
and that probably means the Baltic states, with the obvious aim
of dividing and ultimately breaking NATO in the process. I
sincerely hope that we are not going to be told, perhaps some
months or years from now, even from that famous Dispatch Box,
that Estonia is, after all,
“a far away country…of whom we know nothing”.
That is exactly what the Russians want.
Russians traditionally admire strength and despise weakness, and
what they now perceive is a weakened NATO lacking in resolve to
assert its democratic right to collective self-defence. The next
few weeks are likely to be very telling in that respect. I still
hope and believe that President Biden, who as a young senator
actively supported Britain during the 1982 Falklands war, can
recover his leadership role and, with support from European NATO
allies, face down any potential Russian incursion into the heart
of Ukraine and, indeed, any further adventurism elsewhere.
History tells us again and again that appeasement does not work
and that countries that wish to remain free have consistently to
assert the right to defend themselves against potential
aggression. I say as the proud son of a D-day veteran who fought
the Nazis, as did the Russian people, that we forget that lesson
at our peril. Or to quote the Prime Minister’s other hero,
Pericles of Athens, and I am looking directly at the
Minister:
“Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the
courage to defend it.”
The House has been unanimous today that we must retain that
courage, and I hope we do because Pericles’s lesson holds true,
two and a half millennia on.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker
After the next speaker I will have to reduce the time limit to
seven minutes.
3.46pm
It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for
Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), with whom I serve on the
Defence Committee. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for
Harwich and North Essex ( ) for securing this important
debate, which has been a delight to listen to so far. I will try
to maintain that standard.
I have served on the Defence Committee and in the NATO
Parliamentary Assembly for the past two years, and the threat of
Russia comes up in many of our discussions. Each time there are
differing viewpoints on what Russia’s grand strategy is. There
are many ideas and thoughts and, as have heard today, although we
are united on what the threat is, there are differing views on
the grand strategy. We need to establish the ultimate goal that
Russia or President Putin, which is the same thing, is looking to
achieve. If we can understand this strategy, it will be easier to
work backwards, allowing us to counter any possible threat that
the grand strategy could pose.
We tend to look at what has happened in the past and think it
will be replicated in the future, which is not always the case. I
am not saying it will or will not be replicated, but we should
look at what happened in Georgia and Crimea, and at the build-up
of troops on the Ukrainian border. We could take the viewpoint
that, logically, Ukraine will follow the same route as Crimea and
be taken over by Russia. I am not saying that will or will not
happen; I am trying to have an informed debate on the overall
grand strategy of Russia, not necessarily Russia’s next
steps.
We have heard numerous Members say today that we are taking a
tactical approach, and not necessarily a strategic approach. For
example, if Ukraine is the next play for Russia but not the end
goal, we are no wiser about the grand strategy and we will always
be playing catch-up. We will always deploy ineffective deterrents
or countermeasures, and we will always be working on a reactive
approach rather than a proactive approach to counter any threat
to our nation.
I do think Russia has a grand strategy, and I do not take the
argument that Russia is just continuing on a whim. I believe that
President Putin has a clear view of what he is trying to achieve,
whether it is day to day or in the longer term. He knows what he
is trying to do, and the reason I take that view is not just
because of the build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border.
I recently visited Kirkenes near the Norwegian-Russian border
with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to see the threat that
Russia could pose in the High North. The Arctic ice is melting
far quicker than most people believed it would, which has opened
a huge commercial trade area, as well as a larger area for
conflict, in the High North. Russia has amassed a navy and a
nuclear capability that we have not seen in that region since the
cold war.
I also believe there are many inaccuracies in the general
viewpoint on the current state of the Russian armed forces.
One thing I did not have time to mention is that the
intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, which was concluded by
Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, has fallen into disrepair
because Putin has deployed a new missile—an intermediate nuclear
missile, which NATO calls the Screwdriver and which we believe is
stationed in a position to threaten western European powers in
breach of that treaty. The Russians are now calling for us to
remove all nuclear weapons from European soil. They have breached
the INF treaty, and now they accuse us of doing so by refusing to
withdraw nuclear weapons that do not breach it. That shows the
inequality of the analysis that Russia presents in its
propaganda.
Yes; what Russia is trying to do is completely incoherent and
unbalanced, and I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.
As I have said, Russia’s military is not what it was two decades
ago. While we have spent the last 20 years in the middle east
with our allies, Russia has invested heavily in a capability far
beyond what it has ever had. I am not for one minute trying to
make Russia appear 10 feet tall, but let us look at what it is
doing. It has modernised its naval capability, and it understands
the importance of sea warfare. It has made an advance in its
hypersonic missile capability. I do not think it is as advanced
as some media reports make out, but it is getting there. The NATO
Parliamentary Assembly has recently produced a report on the
matter, if anybody would like to have a look at it.
Russia has increased its nuclear capability at a rapid rate, and,
as my hon. Friend has mentioned, the development of the Poseidon
nuclear weapon is of major concern. We talk about the Wagner
Group, which everyone refers to as being in Africa. Its advance
parties were recently seen in the High North and on Svalbard. No
weapons were seen there, but it is of concern that the group is
expressing an interest in that area.
Russia’s cyber capability and its disinformation—operating in the
grey zone, with sub-threshold hybrid warfare in that space
between peace and war—should give us a huge inkling that we are
not at the stage of peace with Russia. Many examples have been
highlighted in this debate, and I am sure there will be many
more. It is of the utmost importance that we understand the grand
strategy of Russia to ensure that we can counter any threat that
should arise.
I will finish on this point. The former Chief of the Defence
Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, has said that the biggest concern
that kept him awake at night was miscalculation. I have recently
read the book “Countdown to War” by Sean McMeekin, which
describes the build-up to the first world war—35 days of probably
the biggest miscalculation we have ever seen. That was the time
it took from no war being expected to the start of a war, with
catastrophic events. That happened very quickly. If we had had
effective statecraft, it could have been avoided. Let us learn
from history and understand the grand strategy of Russia, but it
is vital at this time that the highest level of diplomacy is used
to prevent another miscalculation.
3.53pm
We have spent a lot of time on Russia, and we have heard from a
lot of people who claim to understand the Russian mentality, but
I am not sure it has been mentioned that in the Orthodox
calendar, tomorrow is Christmas day. I shall be joining my
Russian Orthodox wife at the service this evening and tomorrow
morning, and I wish you a very happy Christmas, Madam Deputy
Speaker.
I make no apologies for President Putin. Although I am a former
chairman of our all-party group on Russia, I certainly gave it up
in the light of what happened at Salisbury and before. No doubt
he is running a corrupt regime, although I did go with a Council
of Europe delegation to look at a previous election that
President Putin won, and there was no doubt that there were a lot
of people voting for him because people felt that he had restored
the pride and the greatness of Russia after the terrible,
infinitely corrupt and useless years of Yeltsin, when we took
Russia for granted.
I make no apology for President Putin and I do not defend him in
any way, but I think the mistake of this debate is to assume, if
there was any other conceivable leader of Russia, that their
strategy would be very different. Many Russians felt deeply
humiliated at the loss of territory that formerly belonged to the
Soviet Union, and we constantly hear about the invasion of Crimea
and the Donbass region. We hear very little in this Chamber about
the fact that Crimea was of course part of Russia for 200 years.
It was signed away by the pen of Khrushchev, without the Crimean
people being consulted at all, in the 1950s. There is no doubt at
all that Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian and wants to be
overwhelmingly Russian, and we have to respect its
self-determination, and the same applies to many areas of eastern
Ukraine.
I am not going to disagree entirely, because I think my right
hon. Friend has a useful alternative voice, but what he is saying
about eastern Ukraine is not really true, because ethnic Russians
are not in the majority. I think he is getting confused between
Russian speakers and ethnic Russians—even in Crimea. He talks
about the Russian people in Crimea, but Crimea was historically
Crimean Tatar, which was the indigenous population. There has
been an awful lot of infill of Soviet military pensioners, but
that is different from the indigenous people.
I know that entirely, but when people go on about the fact that
Crimea was originally Tatar—no doubt America was originally
populated by Red Indians, but we do not say that America does not
belong to Americans—the fact is that we have to deal with the
situation on the ground. All I am saying is that there is an
overwhelming feeling among Russian people of a deep sense of
humiliation during the Yeltsin years, and as in all countries,
they yearn for strong government and leadership.
The correct way for this to have proceeded is for Crimea to have
held a referendum about its status in or out of Russia before the
transfer of a territory back to Russia, but that did not happen.
It was like the Sudeten Germans being polled about rejoining
Germany and being annexed out of Czechoslovakia by Hitler. It was
exactly the same as that. I think that for my right hon. Friend
somehow to excuse what happened on the basis of historical
populations really provides spurious credibility to a
dictator.
But we are where we are, and one of the mistakes of these sorts
of debates is to equate Putin, for all his faults and his
corruption, with Hitler. I would suggest that we are where we are
in Crimea, and there is no doubt about the fact that the majority
of the population want to be Russian. They may not have been
transferred in the right way, but that is the fact. But Putin is
not Hitler. It is true that, whoever becomes the leader of
Russia, they will try to hold and to build on the influence in
territories that were part of the Soviet Union. That is Russian
grand strategy. People may not agree with it and they may not
understand it, but it is a fact of life.
On the NATO point, I am confused about why people constantly
argue that the way to solve this problem is for Ukraine to become
part of NATO. In recently divulged documents, US Secretary of
State James Baker said to President Gorbachev on 9 February
1990:
“We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other
European countries as well it is important to have guarantees
that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within
the framework of NATO not an inch of NATO’s present military
jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
The truth is that Ukraine is not going to join NATO. It would be
a provocative act, and in constantly talking about it in this
Chamber and in the west as if it is likely to happen, we are
simply providing an excuse for President Putin to play the game
of being the underdog and of Russia being threatened, so why do
we do it? When we know NATO is never actually going to absorb
Ukraine, why do we go on talking about it?
My right hon. Friend is making a reasonable point about whether
something may or may not happen, but does he at least accept the
point that free countries can choose to associate with whomever
they like? Some join the European Union, some join the
Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, some join
NATO and some join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Do
the Ukrainian people not have a say in this, or do they actually
belong to Russia?
Yes, but it is not going to happen, for this reason: President
Biden is not the sort of President who is ever going to do it. He
is a weak President and he is not going to suddenly elect Ukraine
into NATO. We all know that, and that is the reality. We should
let Ukraine into NATO only if we are prepared to fight for it, if
we are prepared to spill American and British blood for the
frozen steppes of eastern Ukraine, and nobody wants to do that.
By the way, if we did do it, we would lose our nerve very
quickly. Look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. After a few years, if
there were just 300 dead British soldiers there would be
tremendous pressure in this House of Commons to withdraw. Russia
would simply stay—it does not mind if it has to wait 20 or 30
years. So it is never going to happen. Ukraine is never going to
join NATO, and if it did join NATO it would be potentially
disastrous. In talking about Ukraine joining NATO, we are simply
playing Putin’s game.
Now, the other talk we have had is about Russia being a mortal
threat to our country, but this is not the Soviet Union. Russian
armies are not placed in the middle of east Germany. Where is
this mortal threat? We hear about all this hacking. No doubt
Russia hacks. No doubt it has rather ineffective campaigns on
Twitter. Are we so lacking in our faith in our own parliamentary
democracy that we think we are going to be overthrown or are
under threat from President Putin? This is not a strategic
interest of the United Kingdom. Of course all Russian Governments
will seek to extend their influence. Any Russian Government will
be mortally opposed to NATO expanding eastwards. This rotten
Russian Government might try to subvert aspects of our life, but
why do we not have self-confidence? Why do we not look to our own
proper strategic interests? We have no historic or strategic
interest as a country in Crimea or eastern Ukraine. We do not
understand it. We do not understand the history. We do not
understand the complexities of the region. We do not understand
the Ukrainian state itself, which is divided.
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
No, I have given way three times already.
Ukraine is divided. The second-largest party in Ukraine is a
pro-Russian party. It ranks very high on the corruption index.
When it controlled eastern Ukraine, it did everything it could to
deny autonomy to Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. Members can
agree with me or not, but they have to understand that that is
the point of view of many Russian people, and they are entitled
to their view as much as we are.
Learn from history: look at Afghanistan. Look at Iraq. We in the
west are not prepared to fight for these people. Why are we
destabilising the region by pretending we are when we know
perfectly well—everybody in this Chamber knows perfectly
well—that we are not prepared to risk a drop of British blood? We
have to live with this Russian Government. We have to stop
talking about expanding eastwards. We have to stop playing
Putin’s game.
I know this is realpolitik. I know it is not redolent of great
liberal imperialist speeches about how we must make the world
safe for democracy, and that the Iraqi people, the Afghan people
or the Ukrainian people have a right to live under a democratic
regime. What nonsense I am talking—these are the facts of life.
This is realism. Are we really prepared to muck up eastern
Ukraine in the same way we have mucked up Iraq and
Afghanistan?
Mr Deputy Speaker
The wind-ups will begin prompt at 4.30 pm, if not before.
4.03pm
Following on from my right hon. Friend the Member for
Gainsborough ( ), it is worth saying that the
Kiev International Institute of Sociology did a poll in eastern
Ukraine and found that support for Russia had halved from 80% to
40% since Donbass was effectively invaded by Russia.
Nobody in today’s debate has stood up and said that Ukraine
should join NATO. I accept my right hon. Friend’s argument that
others have suggested it. NATO is one argument—my right hon.
Friend says that is music to President Putin’s ears and he can
exploit that—but this country is also a signatory to the 1994
Budapest agreement, which allowed Ukraine to give up its nuclear
arsenal and have its borders protected by Russia, by us and by
other countries, so I argue that we have a responsibility to
Ukraine that falls outside our membership of NATO.
It is also worth putting on the record in the House that there
are many reports of the ethnic cleansing of Tatars in Crimea.
There are reports that 25,000 people have disappeared. There is a
complete lockdown on the verification by outside international
media of what is taking place in Crimea. To follow the comment by
my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight () about the population of Crimea,
I do not think we can simply dismiss the matter by saying that
the people of Crimea want to remain in Russia, because there are
many aspects to it.
One thing that has been overlooked in today’s debate so far is
that we have talked about the geopolitical consequences of the
grand strategy but we have not spoken about the consequences of
the murder that is happening on the ground in various areas where
Russia has a malign influence, whether that is Crimea, the
Donbass, Georgia, Armenia or other regions. We should be careful
not to soften how we describe the situation today.
This is just a quick point: the 1994 Budapest accord referred not
just to Ukraine but to Kazakhstan, and today Russians have gone
into Kazakhstan. If we look at the accord, we see that we have
guaranteed the sovereign integrity of Kazakhstan.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, because he reinforces the
point that I am trying to make: this is not just about whether
Ukraine should join NATO and whether we should support Ukraine.
We have committed ourselves to other countries, but today’s
debate seems to be saying, “Well, tough luck. There’s nothing we
can do about it.”
On the grand strategy, if we try to summarise what Russia is
trying to achieve overall, let us look at the EAEC—the Eurasian
Economic Community—which was formed in 2000 and is now known as
the Eurasian Economic Union, which Putin holds dear. The analysis
is that it needs 250 million people to work as a viable internal
trading bloc that could then challenge other areas. To achieve
that, the union needs the 43 million Ukrainians and their
powerful agricultural output to succeed. When we look at the
countries Moscow wants to bring into that pact, we see that it is
in effect a neo-USSR. As has been said many times today, we have
to stand up to the idea that Russia can come to the table saying,
in effect, “Troops must be withdrawn from all the east European
NATO countries; otherwise, we are going to invade.”
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr
Francois) made an important point about the political situation
in the USA. Let us not forget that then Vice-President Biden had
an enormous fallout with President Obama about the surge into
Iraq. He was always opposed to a lot of the interventions that
took place. If we in this House know that, we can be damned sure
that President Putin, sat in Moscow, knows that and he will be
making that analysis.
I come back to where this all started: in the summer of 2013,
when President Obama had said, “If you drop chemical weapons in
Syria, that is a red line that we will not tolerate.” They
dropped chemical weapons in Syria and President Obama pretty much
just wrote a stiff letter to The Washington Post. We can track
exactly what happened from that point: in less than a year
President Putin walked into Crimea. Again, what did we do?
Nothing. We did not do anything.
May I briefly remind my right hon. Friend of what happened with
the invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008? President
Bush moved the sixth fleet into the Black sea, ready to confront
Russian aggression, and the invasion stopped. We are going to
need that kind of response now; of course, the two treaties and
the hypersonic weapons are intended to pre-empt any possibility
of that kind of response.
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who reinforces the point
that I was making. This is where we get the Jekyll and Hyde—or
the paradox, if you like—of President Trump. In early 2017, there
was another chemical weapon attack in Syria and, within a short
space of time, the American Administration under President Trump
launched 26 Tomahawk missiles on strategic targets in Syria. For
the rest of that presidency, nothing else happened in that arena.
However, President Trump’s actions exactly a year ago today were
manna from heaven in Moscow, because that idea of undermining
democracy, destabilising the west and creating divisions in
societies is one reason why there is such ambiguity about whether
the USA would support its NATO allies in Europe, as it is dealing
with such a split society at home. We could say that, over the
last 10 to 15 years, Russian objectives in the USA were invited
by President Obama, created by President Trump and too much of a
concern to tackle for President Biden. The debate should not be
about America and its entirely different Government, but I am
afraid that it is relevant to the conversation.
We must accept a couple of things. My hon. Friend the Member for
Shrewsbury and Atcham () often talks about Nord
Stream 2, and he is right to do so. I do not believe for one
second that it will be switched off or not commissioned. It will
be switched on—that will happen—and that will put the Poles and
people in eastern Europe in a very difficult position. However,
that boat sailed 20 years ago and we are where we are. This
country and its leadership have tried to point out the folly of
that programme, and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly talks about
it all the time, but I do not see how anything will change. That
is where we are today.
We must come to some conclusions. As the right hon. Member for
Warley () said, the cold war exists
again—it started the moment that Putin walked into Crimea. The
invasion of Crimea changed the last 25 years of policy at NATO in
Brussels. It obviously had a defensive policy up to the end of
the cold war and then more of a political one, but that changed
everything. It is now both political and defensive. However, the
progress made in a very short period—almost, if you will, in a
panic about what happened—shows that we are back in a cold war
status, and NATO recognises that. As we are in a cold war status,
let us not even entertain the argument of people saying, “We
don’t want another cold war.” It is there—accept it.
Now, we lived through a cold war for 50 or 60 years—what did we
do? Surely everything is about counterbalance. As my hon. Friend
the Member for Harwich and North Essex ( ) said, when the invasion of
Georgia came, President Bush sent the sixth fleet in. That was a
counterbalancing, reactive measure. Many of us across the House
recognise the importance of renewing Trident, because that is
about counterbalances. There are those who say, “Trident will
never be used,” but we know that it is used every single day. It
would be a failure of policy if we ever fired the weapons—but by
then none of us would care because we would be at 10,000° F. The
reality is that that weapon works every day, and counterbalance
is what we must do.
We come, therefore, to a simple conclusion. Today, our
constituents—especially the poorest in our constituencies—are
suffering from gas prices that are being manipulated from Moscow.
That is a fact. There was a big argument about what the Treasury
can do, but the reality is that we are allowing these things to
happen because we are not standing up against them. A simple
message must go to the Treasury today. In the cold war, we spent
5% of GDP on defence. We cannot carry on with today’s level of
defence spending. It must increase, because we are back to where
we were 30 years ago. My right hon. Friend the Member for
Gainsborough said that it is realpolitik, and it is. We must
realise that we are in a cold war and that we must increase
defence spending. Counterbalance is the only way to stop the
situation escalating.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. The wind-ups will start at 4.30 pm, so I am afraid that
the limit is now five minutes.
4.14pm
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex
( ) for securing this important
debate, in which colleagues have raised important issues relating
to Russia’s grand strategy.
It is particularly timely that we are talking about energy
security and the extent to which we are dependent on Russian gas
exports. It is clear that Russia has the power to influence the
rising energy bills that affect many of our constituents. I very
much hope that we will continue to increase our domestic energy
production so that we become less reliant on Russian exports.
I share colleagues’ concerns about Ukraine’s fate. The events of
2014 and the tragic effects of the war still being fought in the
east of the country today should leave us in little doubt that
Russia is prepared to violate sovereign territory to further its
own aims, as the brief five-day war of 2008 in Georgia had
earlier indicated.
I also appreciate the increasing concerns about Russia’s actions
in cyber-space, which is perhaps the most complex and difficult
of the areas that have been covered in the debate. When cyber-war
is discussed, it usually seems to include everything from a
Russia-attributed attack on Estonia’s Government and financial
institutions in 2007 to the NotPetya ransomware attacks against
Ukraine in 2017 and even the SolarWinds espionage of 2020, in
which UK Government computers were among the millions across the
world on to which Russian agents quietly sneaked, remaining to
listen and gather intelligence.
The last point sounds rather alarmist. We are right to make every
effort to clamp down on and weed out digital Russian spies
wherever we find them. We know what to do when we find a physical
spy, so when spying is done via a digital medium, why do we hear
respected voices announcing that there has been a “cyber-attack”?
When a Russian spy is detected in the UK, we do not claim that
Russia has launched an attack; rather, we use the existing tools
at our disposal to deal with the situation in the established
way. Applying the term “cyber-attack” to cyber-espionage is
extremely unhelpful, especially in relation to Russia: rather
than seeking to develop and promote the norms that countries
should follow when they detect cyber-espionage operations, we
lose ourselves in needless sensational hysteria, abusing terms
such as “cyber-war” and “cyber-attack”.
When we want to understand Russian cyber-espionage and how we
respond to it, we do not need to look much past the rules and
norms that we have already established with conventional
espionage to understand the role that cyber-espionage plays in
Russia’s grand strategy. However, while looking towards
traditional espionage helps us to understand some of Russia’s
strategy in cyber-space, the fact that the area is still widely
misunderstood and lacks rules and norms for operation means that
there is still ample scope for Russia to navigate and pursue its
grand strategy in what many people call the grey zone.
Let us take the international response to the Russia-attributed
denial-of-service cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007. Despite
effectively cutting off Estonia from the rest of the world and
cutting off its citizens from their Government and financial
institutions for some three weeks, it was not deemed an attack
under article 5. Qualifying as such an attack would have seen the
NATO alliance rise to Estonia’s defence in a war with Russia.
Although there was no loss of data or money and no physical
damage to resources, it seems plausible to say that it was an
attack, but that was not how NATO saw it. That issue needs to be
addressed.
Denial-of-service attacks are not rare. Russia launched similar
denial-of-service attacks against the Georgian Government in 2008
as part of the five-day war, although this time they were aimed
solely at Government and military sites. In 2017, Russia launched
the ransomware NotPetya against Ukrainian banks, energy companies
and infrastructure. It combined that cyber-sabotage with kinetic
troop movements on the eastern border, again to display power.
Attribution is not overly complex: the UK’s National Cyber
Security Centre has said that Russia was “almost certainly”
responsible for the attack.
As many of us in the House remember from seeing North Korea’s
WannaCry ransomware unintentionally lock an estimated 70,000 NHS
machines in May 2017, the rules and norms that exist in kinetic
war, such as not attacking a hospital, simply do not exist in
cyber-space. That is something that we clearly need to address.
While it is clear that Russia sees cyber-espionage as part of
reasonable statecraft in the present day, as the 2020 SolarWinds
hack indicates, and while it is clear that Russia was perfectly
happy to conduct clear cyber-attacks against Estonia in 2007 and
Georgia in 2008, the international jury is still out on what is
acceptable in cyber-space.
We must avoid alarmist declarations of “cyber-attack” or
“cyber-war” every time we detect cyber-espionage attributed to
Russia. Let us use the tools already in our arsenal to react to
such cyber-espionage as and when we detect it. Let us mobilise
the culture and machinery of government to determine how we view
Russian action in cyber-space, building on recent publications.
Most importantly, let us lead the international community in
clearly laying down rules and norms to which Russia will feel an
international obligation, so that no school or hospital ever need
fear an indiscriminate cyber-weapon wreaking havoc, as happened
to much of the NHS at the sloppy hands of North Korea in 2017,
and so that we are ready to act proportionately as and when a
cyber-attack may occur. As my hon. Friend the Member for
Wolverhampton South West () said, we also need to
avoid miscalculation.
4.19pm
I will crack on through as many points as I can in the next few
minutes. To answer the central question of the debate about
Russian grand strategy, in the realm of Europe at any rate, it is
probably down to four things: first, the reabsorption of Ukraine
and Belarus into Russia’s sphere of interest and control;
secondly, the shattering of NATO; thirdly, the establishment of a
sphere of influence line from Kaliningrad in the north to the
Baltic and Transnistria in the Balkans, to the east of which is
Russia’s sphere of interest out of which it will fight to push
any western influence, including from Russia, Belarus—obviously,
by now—and potentially the Baltic republics in future; and
fourthly, the re-establishment by President Putin of a Russia
that is virulently illiberal, hostile to the western interest
and, in the Russian historical term, a Slavophile rather than a
westernising nation.
The idea peddled by my right hon. Friend the Member for
Gainsborough ( ), who to be fair, made some
valid points, that that was inevitable, is simply nonsense. It
was not inevitable at all and it is incredibly tragic that it has
happened. More broadly, as several hon. Members have said, there
is a battle this century between open and closed societies. Open
societies are not yet prepared, but China and Russia are
effectively engaged in forms of hybrid conflict—I will come to
that term, if I may, because I think we are slightly misusing
it—with the west. It is non-military at the moment, but there is
no doubt that it is happening.
Some people say that Russia is a great mystery—as if we need to
have some great cosmic understanding of it—but to be fair to the
Russians, they signal clearly. Putin’s essay this summer on the
historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people was a signal
that he does not respect Ukraine’s borders—it is a
no-brainer.
To return to the point about hybrid war, if anyone wants to
understand what the Russians think contemporary Russian warfare
is, I respectfully suggest that they read the Russian military
doctrine that is available on the Russian MOD website in English
and Russian. If they fancy a weekend project reading it, they
will understand that the first characteristic of contemporary
warfare, which we sometimes call hybrid war, is the combination
of military and non-military effects in the service of state
power with popular protests and special operations, combining the
economic, political and military. It is all there written down.
It is not a secret and we do not have to interpret it.
Hybrid war, as laid out by Frank Hoffman when he was originally
talking about Hezbollah about 25 years ago, is the combination of
military and non-military. It is not the non-military or the grey
zone war, which is different to hybrid war. The purpose of hybrid
war—the true definition that is used in academic circles—is the
combination of military and other tools.
To be fair to my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough
and to President Putin, the Russians are under intense threat. In
the past two political generations, they have experienced
profound shock: the loss of the Warsaw pact, the loss of their
buffer territory, the loss of former Soviet republics, two
putsches, absolute economic decline and an utter change in their
world. Since the end of the cold war, our view has been a rather
woolly liberal internationalism. Their view has become a hardened
aggressive zero-sum realist game. They sleep well when others do
not. The great strategic conundrum is how to overcome that in the
next two decades without war.
I have run out of time, because other hon. Members spoke for more
than 10 minutes, which is a shame, so I will wind up with three
points about Russian strategic culture. Historically, most
historians and strategists would say that there are three
elements of Russian strategic culture or three pressures that
feed Russian strategic cultural thinking.
First, there is the sense of external threat—to put it bluntly,
no borders. To be fair to them, they have been invaded by the
Tartars, the Swedes, the Poles, the French and the Russians.
Nowadays, that sense of threat is not only physical but more
psychological, hence the need to control the internet and shut
down non-governmental organisations that are pro-western or
funded by the west. The sense of psychological threat is sadly
reaching paranoid conspiracy theory levels among the Russian
elites. Secondly, there is the defence of its autocratic
political system. Thirdly, there is its desire to be a great
power.
Those pressures feed into the nexus that is Ukraine, because
without Ukraine, Russia feels less of a great power. It is
threatened because if democracy works in Kiev, it can work in
Moscow, and it is losing its buffer territory. For those three
strategic reasons, so much of Russia’s strategic angst is focused
on Ukraine. I will leave it there.
Mr Deputy Speaker
To resume his seat no later than 4.30 pm, I call .
4.24pm
As the sole Conservative Member of Parliament to have been born
in a communist country, I know what the Russians are capable of
on our continent. I remember returning to Poland to see my
beloved grandfather in 1983, when martial law was finally lifted,
and saw at first hand what the Russians did to the country of my
birth in the coercion, manipulation and control of this country
of central and eastern Europe.
Yet today we see a different form of manipulation on our
continent by the Russians. There is no greater manifestation of
that than the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. I have tried to raise this
issue on a number of occasions. I had a debate on it last year.
However, there seems to be little appetite from our own
Government to take a lead on our continent in stopping this
project, and I feel that it is now a missed opportunity. We have
heard many times about the current poor American leadership and
the flip-flopping that has occurred on the part of President
Biden on the issue of Nord Stream 2, and indeed his pandering to
Germany and others in allowing this pipeline to materialise. It
gives the Russians unprecedented access to the very heart of our
continent, not only in terms of their ability to control and
manipulate gas prices, their main export commodity, but the
blackmail and coercion they seek to put countries such as Ukraine
under, as well as our NATO partners, the Baltic states, Poland
and others. When he was President of the United States, President
Trump, at a breakfast meeting with Jens Stoltenberg, made a very
interesting comment that I strongly support. He asked what is the
purpose of Americans sending troops and equipment to central and
eastern Europe when one NATO country, namely Germany, completely
ignores and bypasses the spirit and the letter of the law of NATO
membership in terms of common energy security and common
strategy, thereby giving hard currency to our main opponent in
Moscow, which uses that money to put rockets, tanks and other
aggressive equipment on the borders with Poland and other
countries.
That is in stark contrast with Poland and Croatia. I want hon.
Members to know that Poland has invested billions of dollars in a
liquefied gas terminal in Świnoujście on the Baltic coast, and so
has Croatia. These very sensible NATO partners are taking a lead
in demonstrating that if you have the privilege of NATO
membership—a situation peculiar to only 30 nations in the
world—with that also comes responsibility. We need to start
thinking, as NATO partners, about how we ensure that we follow
the Polish and Croatian policy, which is to build liquefied gas
capacity and to be less dependent on Russian gas. Where do you
think the Poles are buying their liquefied gas from? From fellow
NATO partners. They are building a pipeline directly to Norway, a
fellow NATO partner, to buy their gas from there. They are buying
liquefied gas from America, a fellow NATO partner. These are the
sorts of examples that other countries such as Germany ought to
follow.
Sweden, Finland, Ukraine and Georgia are the last major countries
in Europe that do not have the benefits of NATO membership. I am
very fond of my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough
( ), but I disagree with him
fundamentally on this issue. We need to look as to how to
incorporate and support these last four countries in joining the
NATO partnership. This week—for the first time ever, to my
knowledge—Finland started to talk about potentially joining NATO,
because of Russia’s nefarious conduct in Ukraine.
Lastly, when Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO in ’99, we
heard the siren calls: that it was a step too far; that it would
cause world war three. When Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2004,
we heard those same calls. That did not lead to war, and we now
need to support Ukraine and others in joining our
organisation.
4.29pm
It is a pleasure to wind up for the SNP in what has been a good
debate. I commend the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex
( ) for securing it and the
Backbench Business Committee for granting it. We have heard a
number of very thoughtful contributions, and I hope to reflect
some of them in my remarks.
The first thing we need to stress is that not a single one of the
contributions has been Russophobic in any sense. None of us, of
any political persuasion, has any difficulty with the Russian
people or quarrel with them. I have a number of connections to
Russia—my grandpa was on the Arctic convoys, which were mentioned
earlier; and Scotland and Russia share a patron saint in Saint
Andrew. We all of us have deep personal connections to that
fascinating country and those wonderful people. However—I was
struck by this point a couple of times during the debate—in the
same way as at the end of the second world war Germany’s defeat
was also Germany’s liberation, the problems begin and end with
the regime in Moscow, and the first victims of that regime are
the people of Russia themselves.
This is a kleptocratic authoritarian regime that oppresses and
impoverishes its own people. It treats minorities, especially
LGBT minorities, appallingly. It imprisons, harasses and poisons
journalists and democratic activists. It keeps the population in
fear of the other at home and of us in the wider world. The fact
that fear of invasion and war regularly tops the concerns of the
people of Russia—opinion poll after opinion poll should give us
pause—means that a successful disinformation campaign has been
waged against the people of Russia by their own Government, to
keep that regime in post.
Abroad, we see that pattern of behaviour, which is always testing
boundaries and exploiting weaknesses, territorially in Russia’s
near abroad, in central Asia, Belarus, the Caucasus, the Balkans,
the Baltic states and Ukraine—just wait until the Arctic gets
going, because we have seen a number of worrying developments
there as well. We also see more thematic interference by the
Russian regime in the internal affairs of other countries
elsewhere. We see that in exporting corruption; exploiting
weaknesses in transparency and the checks and balances of
domestic systems; manipulating energy markets, causing social
unrest in various places; and the weaponisation of
disinformation, used to foment unrest and to sow political
discord, taking over elements of domestic politics. We have seen
that in a number of European countries, in the States and
here.
What to do? We have heard a number of analytical points, but I
would like to take some action points away from the debate. To my
mind, defence needs to be discussed in much closer connection
with resilience. Resilience is about resilient societies and
informed democracies. Informed and prosperous democracies are
less vulnerable—more resilient—to the sorts of tactics used by
the Russian regime to destabilise its neighbours and those
elsewhere. The fact is that the law is simply not where it needs
to be for the UK’s resilience and integrity in democracy,
political financing and resistance to disinformation. I include
Scotland in that, because many of the laws concerned are reserved
to this place.
Resilience begins at home, so credibility and integrity matter. I
made the point earlier to the Foreign Secretary that, in the eyes
of Moscow, her credibility is undermined by the reality that far
too many politicians—I will not name a political party—are in
hock to dirty Russian money. Members of the other place have
bought their seats in the legislature of these islands. I am an
SNP politician, so I have a clear constitutional agenda, but I do
not want our nearest ally, closest friend and best neighbour to
have a weak and vulnerable democracy, and I believe that it
does.
Two credible reports—the Foreign Affairs Committee’s “Moscow’s
Gold” and the Intelligence and Security Committee’s “Russia”
report—have not been taken remotely seriously enough by this
Administration. I do not blame the Minister personally for that,
but this Administration need to take the recommendations in those
reports a damn sight more seriously than they have, because
weakness in resilience and integrity will be exploited by the
Russian regime.
The SNP has a clear constitutional agenda. We have a different
world view from many right hon. and hon. Members of this House,
but above all else we are democrats. We believe in the peaceful
resolution of democratic processes, and we believe in the rule of
law at home and abroad. An SNP Minister will never talk about
resiling from an international commitment in a “specific and
limited way”—a phrase that should live on in infamy. How can we
possibly say that we are credible abroad when we are weakening
the rule of law at home? We believe in the importance of the rule
of law and also in the importance of the international
rules-based order, which matters more to smaller states than to
bigger ones. We have a clear interest, because Russia is a
threat. The Russian regime is a threat to the international
rules-based order, to the territorial integrity of other states
and to the internal workings of our friends and allies. We have a
common agenda in facing it down, and I look forward to hearing
the Minister’s comments later.
4.35pm
I would like to start by thanking the hon. Member for Harwich and
North Essex ( ) for convening this debate,
and Members on both sides of the House for their contributions.
It has been one of the most satisfying and interesting debates
that I have participated in, and frankly it could not have come
at a more crucial time, given the events in Ukraine, Belarus and
the Balkans, and in recent days in Kazakhstan. I want to be clear
from the outset that on this side of the House there is no doubt
about the threat posed by the current Russian regime to our
national security and that of our allies. Britain must therefore
demonstrate robust and consistent leadership and careful
judgment, and we must be crystal clear about our commitment to
ensuring security in Europe.
Christmas day marked 30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet
Union. Since 1989, a new Europe has emerged from behind the iron
curtain, with a reunited Germany at its heart and a swathe of
newly free countries in central and eastern Europe. Many chose to
join the European Union and NATO, or to act in partnership with
them. Millions of Europeans have grown up with new liberties and
new opportunities. But we need to be frank: in the eyes of
President Putin, this liberation was an historic catastrophe.
Putin wants to re-establish Russia’s status and influence,
including dominance over the sovereign countries in its near
abroad. He longs for parity of status with the United States and
sees Russia as locked in an ongoing confrontation with the west.
To that end, the Russian Government push our boundaries and
constantly test our resolve, threatening or using force,
targeting dissidents abroad, spreading disinformation and seeking
to take advantage of our open economies through illicit finance
and corruption. There are some who believe, wrongly, that the
provocation of Russia into an aggressive stance begins in the
west, echoing Putin’s view that through the enlargement of the
European Union and the expansion of NATO, Russia has somehow been
cornered.
The truth is that NATO and the European Union’s enlargement was
not the west moving east, but the east looking west. These were
free, sovereign states seeking a future of security, prosperity,
co-operation and peace in a democratic Europe. It is the Russian
regime that seeks to deny these states autonomy and independence;
it is the Russian regime that has invaded its neighbours and
annexed their territory; and it is the same Russian regime that
seeks to veto the democratic aspirations and undermine the rights
of people outside its own borders, in the way that it has done to
Russian citizens within them.
At present, Russia’s hostility is focused on Ukraine. We must be
clear that we face a moment of acute danger, with over 100,000
troops massed on the border and alarming rhetoric and
unreasonable demands emerging from the Kremlin. We know that
Putin is not afraid to act to undermine Ukraine’s integrity,
overtly or covertly. It is right that the whole House sends a
clear and united message today that we fully support Ukraine’s
sovereignty and territorial integrity, and that Russian action to
further undermine it will be met with severe consequences. It is
also right that we support dialogue to achieve de-escalation
consistent with the security of our NATO allies and the integrity
of Ukraine.
The Putin regime’s hostile actions go far beyond Ukraine. There
is a much wider pattern of destabilising, threatening behaviour
and overt hostile action. It is a charge sheet that runs
roughshod over international norms and Russia’s own commitments:
targeting dissidents and critics abroad with the appalling and
irresponsible use of chemical and radiological weapons;
committing state-based cyber-attacks against public institutions
and private companies in the UK and elsewhere; annexing Crimea
and supporting separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine; invading
Georgia and sustaining its breakaway entities; propping up the
butcher Bashar al-Assad in Syria; sustaining the dictator
Lukashenko in Belarus; fomenting dissent in the fragile Balkans;
using private military companies to pursue national agendas from
Libya to Mali; and overtly or covertly squashing democratic
movements in neighbouring states, such as Kazakhstan potentially
next.
Too often, efforts to engage Russia have been based on the belief
that the Russian Government see the world as we do, or on the
hope that they will do so in the future. If we are to interpret
Russia’s intentions, respond to its behaviour and hope to deter
aggression, we must be realistic about the worldview in the
Kremlin. We should understand that the Putin regime feels
threatened by NATO’s expansion and Ukraine’s democratic
transition, however illegitimate we think those feelings are. It
seeks a sphere of influence, whether we like it or not. It will
try to enhance Europe’s energy dependence, so that it can
manipulate those who might sanction its actions. It believes that
domestic survival depends on total dominance of the political
sphere, financial security, the elimination of opponents, and the
fanning of nationalism and nostalgia. He will ruthlessly pursue
its interests as he sees them, in zero-sum terms. We may hope
that Russia under Putin changes, but we should not expect it to.
In response, we must be strong, consistent and resolute—active at
home and abroad on its challenge.
First, that means being a dependable ally. We must be crystal
clear in our commitment to NATO. That commitment must be
unshakeable. We should collectively send clear and consistent
messages to Russia about unacceptable behaviour and ensure that
there are consequences, not rewards, for efforts to threaten or
intimidate. Secondly, the UK must play a consistent and key
leadership role in European security and defence. While Ministers
are focused on the Indo-Pacific, these developments remind us
about the importance of security in our own backyard in Europe.
We have unique responsibilities, both as a member of the UN P5
and as the guarantor to agreements from the Budapest memorandum
to the Dayton accords. The UK should give the highest priority to
security in Europe and the north Atlantic. Instead, we have seen
a decade of decline for Britain’s defence, with billions of
pounds of waste and mismanagement, the number of tanks cut by a
third and the Army cut to its smallest size in 300 years.
That leadership should also mean rebuilding ties with our
European partners, including in the European Union. Today’s
debate puts into sharp relief the recent petty and unedifying
diplomatic squabbles between the UK and French Governments.
France is our closest defence partner in Europe. It is in all our
interests for those relationships to be managed, conscious of the
real global threats to all of us. We must and should work to
build a more consistent approach to Russia across Europe and
reduce dependence on Russian gas, and that, of course, includes
cancelling Nord Stream 2.
Thirdly, we must strengthen our defences at home. More than 18
months after the Russia report was published, none of its
recommendations has been fully implemented. Most damning is the
fact that the Government have failed to get to grips with the
role of the UK in money laundering and illicit finance, leaving
our country a soft touch for corrupt elites that help to sustain
the Putin regime. It is past time to get serious, and that is why
Labour is creating a taskforce on illicit finance to make Britain
a truly inhospitable place for dirty money and to address finally
the problem robustly.
Lastly, we must always make it clear that our disagreements with
the Russian Government and its actions, and with Putin’s regime,
are not with the Russian people, millions of whom want peace,
stability and mutual respect with their own neighbours and with
the west. Indeed, my own wife’s maternal grandmother and
great-grandmother fled from Russia and the Bolsheviks, and my
children have Russian blood running through their veins. We must
promote continued dialogue, mutual respect and diplomatic
engagement—hard-headed, clear-eyed, and rooted in a framework of
international law and human rights. The alternatives are too
dangerous to contemplate, for Russia and ourselves.
4.46pm
The Minister for Europe
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North
Essex ( ) for securing the debate,
and congratulate him on that and on his very well-researched and
well-delivered speech. He made many points, but one theme that I
spotted—and have spotted throughout the various briefings I have
had during my two weeks in my current role—is that the west seems
to operate in the relatively short term, while Russia, as has
been demonstrated by its actions in Georgia and Crimea right up
to now, operates in the long term. That is something that we
really need to think about.
Like the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), I feel that
this is one of the best debates to which I have ever responded in
this place. I thank all Members for their contributions,
especially the Opposition spokespeople, both of whom made mostly
elegant and excellent speeches. The hon. Member for Stirling
() may not remember that we
served at the same time in the European Parliament at the
beginning of his and the end of my career there. It was good to
hear him speak so widely about this subject. I will try to
respond to as many of the points that have been raised as I can
in the time available to me.
As this debate has highlighted, recent actions by the Russian
state are of significant concern. Indeed, as the integrated
review made clear—and while, as so many Members have said, we
have no issue whatsoever with the Russian people—Russia itself
currently poses the most acute and direct threat to the UK’s
national security. As most Members probably know, we set up a
cross-Government Russia unit in 2017, bringing together the UK’s
diplomatic, intelligence and military capabilities to try to
achieve the maximum effect, and we are working closely with our
partners to address the threats from Russia and hold it to
account. The UK has demonstrated international leadership on
this, for instance through our G7 presidency. Following the
appalling attack in Salisbury in 2018, we expelled 23 Russian
intelligence officers, and the international community joined us
in solidarity. That resulted in the collective expulsion of more
than 150 Russian intelligence officers.
Obviously, the current relationship with Russia is not the one
that we want, but unfortunately it cannot be normalised until
Russia stops its many and various irresponsible and destabilising
activities. We are seeing a very concerning pattern of Russian
military build-up on Ukraine’s border and in illegally annexed
Crimea. We have repeatedly made clear to Russia than any
incursion into Ukraine would be a huge strategic mistake, and
would carry severe costs. The Prime Minister delivered this
message himself when he spoke to President Putin on 13 December,
as did the Foreign Secretary when she met Foreign Minister Lavrov
on 2 December. The Russian Government need to de-escalate their
activities and engage in serious discussions.
As well as speaking directly to Russia, we are working with our
allies and partners to address the challenges to our security.
The Foreign Secretary led G7 Foreign Ministers and the High
Representative to the EU in a joint statement on 12 December:
“We call on Russia to immediately de-escalate, pursue diplomatic
channels, and abide by its international commitments on
transparency of military activities.”
Four days later we joined our NATO allies in a joint statement
from the North Atlantic Council emphasising that we are
“ready for meaningful dialogue with Russia”.
We are firm in our position that NATO will remain the foundation
of collective security in the Euro-Atlantic area, and we will
continue to make our position clear at every opportunity in the
coming days and weeks.
I assure the House that we remain unwavering in our support for
Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Both the Prime Minister and the
Foreign Secretary are in close contact with their Ukrainian
counterparts. Most recently, the Prime Minister spoke to
President Zelensky on 17 December to reiterate the UK’s support,
and the Foreign Secretary spoke to Foreign Minister Kuleba on 4
January.
The Foreign Secretary further demonstrated our support by hosting
the first ever UK-Ukraine strategic dialogue on 8 December, and
we announced a huge range of commitments, including UK support in
the face of Russian aggression and steps to build stronger trade
links. This includes increasing the amount of support available
through UK Export Finance for projects in Ukraine to £3.5
billion. These announcements complement our existing security,
economic and political support to Ukraine, which includes:
defensive military training for 20,000 members of Ukraine’s armed
forces through Operation Orbital; a package of £1.7 billion to
enhance Ukrainian naval capabilities; and vital support in
fighting corruption and strengthening the judiciary.
I am delighted to congratulate my hon. Friend on his new role,
and I am delighted that we are doing all that, but it is a bit
late. The time to make a difference when training and supplying
an army is one, two or three years before the army needs to use
it. If the Russians are intent on invading sooner rather than
later, does he agree that it is all far too late in the day?
I hope it is not. I have been in post for only two weeks, so I am
doing as much as I can as quickly as I can.
Sadly, we know all too well that Russia has a record of
flagrantly violating international law. We are at the forefront
of efforts to end Russia’s illegitimate control of the Crimean
peninsula, and Crimea is, of course, Ukraine. We used our G7
presidency last year to maintain a high level of international
engagement on that, and the UK also supports the international
Crimea Platform in its work to hold Russia to account.
Meanwhile, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham
() mentioned, Russian interference in the western
Balkans threatens to undermine the region’s hard-won security. We
take this extremely seriously and will continue to work with our
partners to strengthen stability, democracy and the rule of law.
To demonstrate this commitment, the Foreign Secretary brought
together the Foreign Ministers of the six western Balkan
countries on 13 December. Our new special envoy to the western
Balkans, Sir Stuart Peach, visited Bosnia and Herzegovina on 16
December and will be back in the region soon.
Mr Ellwood
I welcome my hon. Friend to his post. Given the challenges and
threats to our national and international security, does he agree
it is now time to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP?
I will arrange a meeting for my right hon. Friend with the
Chancellor so he can press that point.
I am also grateful to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member
for Aldridge-Brownhills (), who visited the region and
built strong relationships. She was instrumental in demonstrating
our commitment in this area.
I am wary of the time, so I will move on to a major concern that
most Members articulated. The Government, like most hon. Members,
are deeply concerned about the forced closure of human rights
groups such as Memorial, which was closed down in the past few
days. The work of this particular internationally respected group
of historians and human rights experts is vital to defending
human rights and preserving the memories of victims of political
repression in Russia. The group has worked tirelessly for decades
to ensure that the abuses of the Soviet era are never forgotten,
and its closure is yet another chilling blow to freedom of
expression in Russia. That demonstrates what my right hon. Friend
the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) said about the gradual
and ruthless suppression of dissent, human rights and media
freedoms in the country.
The UK has been at the forefront of calling out Russia’s
malicious cyber activity, in solidarity with our international
partners. In 2020, in tandem with the European Union, we
announced sanctions against the Russian intelligence services for
cyber-attacks against the UK and our allies. Last month, we set
out our new national cyber strategy, backed by £2.6 billion of
funding, to help to protect the United Kingdom and our
international partners. We are developing an autonomous UK cyber
sanctions regime. Our sanctions are carefully targeted to respond
to hostile acts, and to defend freedom and democracy. That
includes sanctions on 180 individuals and 48 entities for the
destabilisation of Crimea, Sevastopol and eastern Ukraine. We
also announced asset freezes and travel bans against 13
individuals and an entity involved in the attempted murder of
Alexei Navalny, the Russian Opposition politician.
We have taken multiple other actions to address the Russian
threat in recent years. As we set out in our response to the
Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report in July 2020,
this includes new legislation to stop individuals at the UK
border to determine whether they are, or have been, involved in
hostile state activity. We have provided the security services
and law enforcement with additional tools to tackle evolving
state threats.
We take the threat from Russia extremely seriously. We are
working closely with our allies and partners to set a strong,
united, consistent signal that Russian aggression will have
severe consequences. We will continue to engage with the Russian
Government on matters of international peace and security, to
address global challenges facing the world, including climate
change and the coronavirus pandemic. We will also use these
channels to raise any wider issues of concern to us.
Will my hon. Friend allow me to intervene?
Forgive me, but I must allow my hon. Friend the Member for
Harwich and North Essex some time to conclude.
For us to work together, Russia must de-escalate its activities
and engage seriously with the international community.
Ultimately, we are all better in co-operation than in opposition,
but I must underline what the Foreign Secretary said to this
House earlier today. Our commitment to Ukraine is unwavering. Any
Russian military incursion into Ukraine would be a massive
strategic mistake and come at a severe cost, including
co-ordinated sanctions.
4.57pm
I thank the Minister for his reply to this debate; was a
privilege for me to open it. I have been humbled by the quality
of the contributions and struck by the 100% unanimity of the
condemnation of President Putin, at least, even though there are
other disagreements. Those are disagreements between friends and
democrats, however; we all disagree with the actions of the
dictator.
I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that everything the
Government are now doing is commendable, but diplomacy, expelling
diplomats, diplomatic language and even economic sanctions are
not enough. We have to develop military capacity to deter. Unless
the penalty of military action, or threatening military action,
is sufficiently painful for our adversary, they will take that
action. No consequences are serious enough unless they deter, and
there is evidence that we are failing to deter.
If there is one objective that we must try to achieve in these
Geneva meetings, it is to reunite NATO and make this a step
change in the behaviour of the west towards Russia—something that
it has not seen for the past decade and a half—so that the
Russians begin to understand that the penalty for what they are
threatening to do in Ukraine and elsewhere is too high, and they
will back off.
Some of my colleagues have said we are in a new cold war—yes, we
are. We should welcome the fact that we have the capacity to
mount a cold war. Like the last cold war, it will end when Russia
ends its aggression, and that has to be the message we take to
our allies and tothe Russians themselves.
I am sorry, but there are too many other brilliant contributions
to mention, except one. Many colleagues have said that we have no
quarrel with the Russian people. I should have called this debate
“Putin’s grand strategy”, because I do not believe the Russian
people are committed to sending their young men into military
action to lose their lives in futile—
5.00pm
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 9(3)).
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