Russian Ship “Yantar”

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

This is a really important question, but I say to everyone that we have to be really careful about the language that we use when we ask, “If this happened, what would we do? If that happened, what would we do? Would we see such and such as an act of war?” That is not to underplay the seriousness of what is happening, but it is about trying—as any Government would—to be reasonable and sensible in the language that is used.

Let nobody be in any doubt that the seriousness of this is significant. We know what the “Yantar” is doing as part of Operation GUGI, we know that it is surveying the underwater cables in a peacetime way for potential use in other scenarios in the future and we are making sure the Russians are aware of that.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

The Minister said he was going to visit the NMIC and the joint cell that was with it down in the south. I do not know whether he has done that yet, but I am glad it is up and operating fully, because we have been bad at tracking the “Yantar” and the other ships of that type. Now, we are doing it properly and we need to have ships that can counter it. I hope that there will be enough money in the Budget for us to get in more ships; we will see.

I have been at sea with the Russians in the Cold War when they tried to ram us, opened weapon systems against us and interrupted flying operations—all highly dangerous things, and similar to what happened in the Iceland cod war. I believe there is more that we can do to make it very uncomfortable for a ship such as the “Yantar”. There are things one can do that make life horrible at sea. They are not all seen and we should start thinking about doing some of those.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for the question. We are trying to do a whole range of different things. He will know that, as well as the measures that I have talked about against the “Yantar”, we have Operation Baltic Sentry—in the Baltic Sea, obviously—which is NATO monitoring, run from Northwood, to track what is going on there. We have Nordic Warden, which is a JEF operation as well, with maritime capabilities, alongside P-8s. There is a whole range of different things that are taking place. The defence investment plan will be published this year; let us see what is in that in terms of the increase in capability to deal with this threat.