Ukraine

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I had prepared a speech but will now have to make a different one, given that last speech from the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). I think he is an outrider for his own party in his view. First, I want to take on this idea that Ukraine historically is just some sort of outcrop of Russia. I will start and go backwards.

My father wrote his PhD on the Viking incursion into Slavic lands. The Varangians created Kyivan Rus’—the Kyiv empire. It was an empire centred not in Moscow, but in Kyiv. Kyiv predates Moscow as the predominant city of the Slavic lands. If anybody wants to make a claim, it should probably be the people in Stockholm, because it was Swedish Vikings who settled those lands and established that kingdom—I do not think the Swedes now have any such ambitions.

If we move back even further, the Scythians settled Crimea and created the agricultural breadbasket that we know today in southern Ukraine and Crimea. They supplied the Greek empire with its grain. That established Athens and other republics in Greece and fostered the democracy that we know now, because the Greeks could rely on the Scythians for grain. That is the ancient legacy of Ukraine. It is not Moscow or the tsars, but the Scythians and then the Varangians. My first point, therefore, is that the Ukrainians have a clear and historic right to a nation. It is straight out of the Putin playbook to try to denounce the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state.

Secondly, I agree with the right hon. Member for Gainsborough that the UK, the United States and every European nation need to go on to a war production footing. We need to increase our production of basic military equipment, such as artillery shells and bullets—the Minister for Armed Forces knows how many times I have questioned him about this issue. We then need more advanced military equipment too. Actually, the most advanced anti-drone manufacturer in the world now is Ukraine. We have much to learn from that, and in future we can do many things in joint ventures for our own defence. But we now need to ramp up our own military production. We have underutilised factories here, in the US—they have promised to increase production by the end of the year—and in Europe. To be fair to the Germans, they have done exactly that, particularly in shell production.

It is estimated that the Russians are expending 10,000 to 15,000 artillery shells a day, while at the beginning of the war that figure was over 50,000, so they have depleted their reserves and are just using their current production. It is inconceivable that 30 or so countries in Europe and North America could not match that level of production if we went on to a war production footing.

I had not intended to talk so much about military production. I had intended to talk about how it has been my honour to be the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Ukraine since December 2022. In that time, I have organised three humanitarian aid convoys to Ukraine and three parliamentary delegations—I see hon. Members in the Chamber who have been on them.

The people of Ukraine owe us nothing, but we owe the people of Ukraine everything. The sacrifices I have seen—towns and villages destroyed; schools obliterated; men without legs or arms who still want to contribute to their country’s war effort. We cannot abandon those people. They did not ask for this situation; it has been meted out to them by a violent, brutal autocrat. I will not call him a dictator—I am not sure whether we are quite there yet—but the last Russian presidential election was not legitimate; it was a stolen election.

We are now in a situation where we are a bit weak minded —I agree with the right hon. Member for Gainsborough on that—and Putin’s mind is like a ball of steel. He will stop at nothing. We need to take that same attitude and stop at nothing. He will back down only if he sees strength; he will not back down on weakness. That is an issue not just for the United Kingdom but, as I said, for the whole of Europe and North America and the rest of the democratic world. We need to ensure that we are doing everything.

I will finish shortly, because I know that others want to speak, but I want to make a few points. It is still not that easy for humanitarian aid to flow across the UK border and EU borders into Ukraine. We are still seeing issues with people from Ukraine gaining visas to travel here. It is not acceptable that people have to travel to Warsaw to get a visa. We need consular services. If they cannot be provided in Kyiv, they should be provided in Lviv.

We also need to look at how the funding that we have raised has been spent from end to end. A large proportion of the money raised by the Disasters Emergency Committee from the goodness of the British people has been spent outside Ukraine, because it has been deemed too difficult to spend it inside Ukraine. However, there are small aid charities, such as those that we have been working with, which are willing and able to spend money in Ukraine but have no supply of funding. We need to open up the books of all the charities. DEC will open up the books only for the money that it has collected, not for each individual organisation. We need to see more money being spent in Ukraine.

We have €300 billion sitting in Euroclear. We need to see that money not just frozen, but seized and then utilised for that war effort. Then we will see a change in the front. The biggest difference that could be made to see a swift conclusion to the war and no more Russian troops on Ukrainian territory is in air superiority. The Ukrainians are losing the war because, owing to the Russians’ air superiority, they cannot defend their troops on the ground. We have done a good job in training the first tranche of pilots from Ukraine, and now other countries are also training them, but they need the planes now. We had a setback following the election in Slovakia—we were about to see planes go, and subsequently they have not. We need other countries, and particularly the United States, to supply F-16s. We also need both variants of the Storm Shadow missile made in the UK to go to Ukraine, not just the export variant, which the hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) expertly spoke about earlier. Finally, we need the resolve and long-term commitment to support Ukraine; not just to see this as something that happened two years ago and is slowly sliding off the agenda.