Ukraine

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

My right hon. Friend has made an important point about munitions systems being inherently defensive when a country is under attack. He has also made an important point about airspace management, and I will come to that later in my speech. I intend to make some progress now.

Since 2014, we have worked to train more than 22,000 Ukrainian troops under Operation Orbital. As well as helping Ukraine to defend itself from attack on the ground, we must help it to defend itself against attack from the skies. That is why we will be sending more supplies, including Starstreak ground-based air defence anti-aircraft missiles. We and our allies need to do everything possible, within the UN charter on self-defence, to help Ukraine to defend itself, which is why I was with my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister this morning discussing with and working with our Nordic and Baltic allies to increase defensive support as part of the UK-led joint expeditionary force. We must be robust in supporting our NATO allies living under the shadow of Russian aggression, so the UK, as NATO’s biggest European contributor, is doubling the number of troops in Estonia and Poland.

As Putin inflicts ever greater misery in Ukraine, we continue our humanitarian and economic support. We have pledged almost £400 million, which includes the supply of more than 700,000 medical items directly to Ukraine and more than 500 power generators to keep essential facilities such as hospitals running. We have also brought 21 critically ill Ukrainian children to the UK to receive life-saving cancer treatment. We are providing more humanitarian aid than any other European country. The British people have also risen to the moment by showing their own huge generosity of spirit. In the short time since our homes for Ukraine scheme was launched, more than 80,000 people have signed up for it.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

It may be helpful for my right hon. Friend to know that according to a Sky newsflash, the figure is now more than 100,000.

[James Cleverly]

That is lovely. It is not usually nice to be wrong at the Dispatch Box, but I am incredibly proud that the figure I quoted, which was accurate a few hours ago when this speech was written, has now been made obsolete by the enormous generosity of spirit of the British people. I think that that shows us at our best. The Disasters Emergency Committee’s appeal has now reached over £150 million, which we are supporting with our largest ever match-funding pledge of £25 million.

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[Mr Lammy]

I entirely agree.

From the beginning, this House has stood united in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty and against Putin’s aggression, so I welcome the news of additional sanctions. We support tough measures against Putin’s cronies and cutting Russia out of the economic system, but let us be clear that we were promised sanctions immediately after the invasion of Ukraine. Since then the Government have been playing catch-up.

The EU sanctioned members of the Russian state Duma on 23 February. Why did the UK not do the same until 11 March? I wrote to the Foreign Secretary on 27 February calling for a ban on the export of luxury goods to Russia. Why did the Government only do that today? The United States sanctioned Oleg Deripaska four years ago. Why did the British Government catch up only five days ago?

The Government’s delayed sanctions gave Putin and his cronies a get-out-of-London-free card. Roman Abramovich, who was sanctioned at the same time as Deripaska, is just one example. Because of Ministers’ tardiness, Abramovich was able to fly his jet out of Stansted and sail one of his superyachts to Montenegro, with his second boat not far behind. As the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) observed, that is £1 billion of assets that have left the United Kingdom.

For too many days during this war, the Government have been behind our EU and US allies on individual sanctions. They have been behind the Opposition on sanctioning banks in Belarus as well as Russia. They have been behind us on sanctioning the energy sector and on closing the loopholes that let Putin’s criminal cronies off the hook.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I accept the political point that the right hon. Gentleman is trying to make, but I am sure he recognises that we were first out of the traps on banking sanctions and that we led on trying to remove Russia from SWIFT. It is simply not fair to paint a picture that we have been following the EU and the US. There has been an international response in different areas, and it has come at different speeds.

[Mr Lammy]

I am not making a political point. This is a great country that typically does not follow the European Union or America but leads them. That is my point.

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[Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman just said that the Conservative party brought Putin to power. Will he remind me who was in government in the year 2000?

[Clive Lewis]

I will give the right hon. Member a quote—it will make the point very clearly:

“When confronting oligarchs and corruption, we need to look well beyond Russia, and not just at other autocracies but at our own national elites and the control that they have over politics and the media. It is too easy to blame Russia and some campaign of foreign subversion. The truth is that we have also been subverted from within and allowed our institutions to be captured and sold. Our media is oligarchic and so, increasingly is our politics. Whether Russian, Australian or British, such concentrated wealth and power is detrimental to our freedom and security.”

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[Alec Shelbrooke]

May I draw on my right hon. Friend’s point about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? I am sure that he has seen the Putin essay. Paragraph 38 is really frightening for European security:

“Under the 1921 Treaty of Riga, concluded between the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and Poland, the western lands of the former Russian Empire were ceded to Poland.”

Does that not make it clear that Putin’s intentions do not stop at Ukraine?

[Dr Lewis]

It makes it absolutely clear. That will be the very next point that I address.

Whereas Russia previously infiltrated by ideology, its leaders now bribe their targets with high-spending oligarchs and the temptations that they place in the way of western politicians. Gerhard Schröder, a former Chancellor of Germany, is the prime example—a man who has been chairman of Rosneft since 2017 and has recently, I believe, been a director of Gazprom as well. He has been at the heart of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) did so much to warn this House against when people were somewhat complacent about it.

For 40 years from 1949, two factors ensured the containment of Russia and the maintenance of peace: the deterrent power of western nuclear weapons and the collective security provided by article 5 of the north Atlantic treaty. No longer could an aggressor attack small European states that belonged to NATO without the Americans immediately entering the war. We know that it is Ukraine’s misfortune not to belong to NATO, and we can argue about whether that should have been permitted. I simply say what I have said all along, which is that if NATO over-extends the guarantee of article 5 to the point at which it ceases to be credible that the major NATO countries would fight world war three to defend the country in question, it undermines the credibility of the guarantee as a whole.

I will conclude by referring to what the former President Petro Poroshenko said on Sky TV at 1 o’clock today. He made a more appropriate parallel with world war two than Putin could ever make when he referred to what we called “lend-lease”, which was the decision taken and signed into law by President Roosevelt in March 1941 to give all sorts of high-value equipment and support to those countries that were fighting for democracy, even though America was not then in the war itself.

Former president Poroshenko quoted Churchill’s words:

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

He also said, “Don’t trust Putin…if you try to compromise with Putin he will go further.”

This relates to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke). There is no doubt at all that the battle that Ukraine is fighting now is the frontline of the battle that would face NATO if NATO’s credibility were undermined.

So it is quite simple, and I think that the Government could go further in terms of this rather artificial distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” weaponry. I believe that fighter jets—provided that they are crewed by Ukrainians and not by people of a NATO nationality—are a defensive weapon, and that we should operate according to a single practical slogan, namely that we will support Ukraine in its fight for democracy by all means short of war; and that means supplying them with the tools so that they can finish the job.

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[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

This has been a fascinating and wide-ranging debate. The hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) made an incredible speech. It was one of the best, and it got to the nub of the military side. It was a fantastic speech.

I was at the Rose-Roth seminar of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Kyiv in 2016, and it was noticeable that a Ukrainian former member of the Minsk group said:

“Appeasers of Russia must go.”

He called it a “Chamberlain complex” and believed it was

“a fundamental failure that people feel they can work with Putin. He gets away with it. The international community must recognise that Russia’s actions are not against just Ukraine, but the whole world.”

That was in relation to the invasion of Crimea.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) had a Backbench Business debate in our first week back this year on the Russian threat, and at the end of my speech I made the point that we have to accept that we are back in a cold war situation and that we must adopt a cold war mentality again. That includes increases in defence spending, on which we have seen an incredible and welcome change in position—I do not call it a U-turn—from the German Government, who have said they will spend 2.2% of GDP on defence, as laid down in the 2014 Wales summit. That is indeed welcome in bolstering NATO, because people are now recognising that whether we like it or not, we are back in a cold war scenario, which means that we have to get the playbooks back out. They are about standing up and pushing back. I have often spoken in the House on various issues about countermeasures and counterbalances, and this situation is about counterbalances. This is about saying to Russia, “Don’t try to push the envelope, because we will push back.”

People who are trying to be apologists for Putin have said, “It was the NATO expansion to the east.” NATO did not expand to the east; the east wanted to join NATO. That is a very subtle difference. The people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are jolly well grateful today that they have got the backing of NATO, because I do not think they would be sleeping easily in their beds if they felt that Russia may be able to just walk through.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that Mr Putin’s claim that he is worried about having a NATO country directly on his border if Ukraine joins NATO is rather given the lie by the fact that if he occupies Ukraine, he will have several NATO countries on his border?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for that, because he touches on something very important. The drive to NATO membership accelerated substantially after Russia had invaded Crimea. Putin invited that move of the Ukrainian Government to look further to the west, as they saw their security threatened. A real analysis could be done of what Putin was doing in and around Ukraine three or four months ago. Was he probing to see what the reactions of the west would be? Was he thinking, “What could happen here? Perhaps I will focus my attentions elsewhere, in the ‘Stans or areas like that.” We have merely to read or analyse the Putin essay for it to become apparent how far this Third Reich mentality of his goes. He makes clear in that essay the centuries-held hatred towards the sacking of Kyiv, the capital of Rus. He also makes clear in that essay the countries he is going to go after—Lithuania, eastern Poland, Belarus; he basically names them. He uses the phrase “Russia was robbed”.

[Simon Hoare]

My right hon. Friend is hitting the nail on the head, because we know where this ends. Adolf Hitler did not accept the settlement at the end of the first world war and sought vengeance, and Putin has never taken the almost self-inflicted degradation of the Russian empire internally. He is like a bear with a sore head and that is potentially dangerous for a large number of people on the European continent.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that, as it leads on to what my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) was saying—that the analysis that Putin has gone mad, has a terminal disease or is suffering as a result of steroids is probably just our trying to understand the reasoning of an evil man. There are more history books that analyse Hitler’s motivations and what happened than are written on anything else. There are so many parallels to be drawn with the situation we find ourselves in today, because Putin has kept testing and pushing. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) said, when the chemical weapons were dropped in Syria it was a huge mistake that nothing was done, purely because President Obama had said that it was a red line that would not be tolerated. If we are going to tolerate it, we should not say that in the first place, because we can now draw a chronological line from that moment to what has happened.

Let us remember that Putin has caused the assassination of people in Berlin, and the Russians have blown up a NATO arms depot in the Czech Republic and launched a chemical weapon attack on the UK. All those things happened in NATO countries and all were met with a limited response, although it was notable that after the Salisbury attack allies from countries outside NATO also got together to remove diplomats from their embassies. Nevertheless, Putin has disregarded the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, used Syria as a training ground and is agitating the situation in the Balkans.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said that we must be responsible to ensure there is not an escalation, but if we do not stand strong, we invite that escalation. As I have said, we have to take a cold war approach, which means doing things that, quite frankly, will probably frighten us all, but we must make sure that the message is clear: our NATO nuclear arsenal is on the same stand-by as the Russian nuclear arsenal. We do not have nuclear weapons in order to use them; we have nuclear weapons to ensure they are not used. That is why Trident is described as a nuclear deterrent: it is a weapon used every day to prevent it from being used. If it is used, it is a complete failure of everything—but frankly we will not be here to have that argument. It is a weapon used every day to keep the peace.

Every day, we are seeing murder take place on a wide scale, at the hands of an invading country. We have not yet seen the destruction of Kyiv, as Putin did to Grozny, or the use of chemical weapons. If those things happen, there will be huge demands for intervention—not necessarily from NATO but from countries that want to help with air support. Please let us not get to that stage. As other right hon. and hon. Members have said, let us make sure that the MiG fighters can get to Ukraine. They do not have to match in numbers the Ukrainian air force because—I remind everybody—in the second world war the Luftwaffe considerably outnumbered the RAF, but that absolute determination to defend our homeland came through.