Armed Forces: Capability

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, when the military capacity of a nation or an alliance of nations becomes demonstrably inadequate, then it serves not as a means of defence but as an encouragement to the ambitions of its potential adversaries. Britain’s military capacity is utterly inadequate to meet the threats that are posed to us and our European allies by an expansionist Russia. We have allowed our Armed Forces to decline because for many years following the demise of the Soviet Union we failed to perceive any major threats to our security and that of our allies.

Nowadays, Vladimir Putin’s expansionist policies are posing a threat to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Such expansionist policies were pursued by Russia at the end of the Napoleonic era, when it annexed what are now Ukraine, Finland, Belarus, Poland and Lithuania. However, on Russia’s withdrawal from participation in the First World War, the Bolsheviks, who were eager for peace, signed away these possessions to Germany and its allies in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A main agenda of post-revolutionary Soviet Russia was to regain these lost territories. By the end of the Second World War, it had achieved most of this and made further acquisitions in eastern Europe. Most of these gains were ceded at the end of the Soviet era.

I am recounting this history because it explains the desires and intentions of Putin’s regime, which aims at regaining lost territories and re-establishing Russian imperial hegemony. A factor that affects the Baltic states is the presence of large numbers of ethnic Russians. There is preponderance of ethnic Russians in the northern part of Estonia, close to the Russian border. Notwithstanding their allegiance to Estonia, these people could provide a ready pretext for a Russian annexation.

Wedged between Poland and Lithuania is the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, previously known as Königsberg and once part of East Prussia, which nowadays has an exclusively Russian population. The Baltic Germans of East Prussia, who were the pre-war population, were expelled en masse at the end of the war. Kaliningrad is now a heavily fortified Russian base containing nuclear-capable Russian missiles and probably much else besides of which we should be fearful.

NATO is committed to defending the sovereignty of the Baltic states. Britain has contributed 500 combat troops to the region, to which it has also consigned four Typhoon jets for periods of four months in the year. At any one time, only two of these jets are operational. This provision, together with the lesser contributions of our NATO allies, does not constitute a realistic deterrent.

If the US were to disengage from NATO, as Donald Trump proposes that it should, then Britain would be expected to become a natural leader of the alliance. We are ill-equipped for such a role. The leader of the Labour party has proposed that, rather than sending troops to defend the borders of the Baltic States, we should aim at mutual demilitarisation. There could be no greater encouragement to Russia to pursue its territorial ambitions.