Select Committee on Defence

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am grateful for this opportunity to lay before the House the Defence Committee’s new report entitled, “Russia: Implications for UK defence and security”, which has been produced on the eve of the Warsaw NATO summit and which highlights the need for that major event to focus on defence and deterrence, but also on dialogue.

I am extremely grateful to all the members of the Defence Committee for their contributions to the genesis of this report. We held four oral evidence sessions and received 18 pieces of written evidence. A delegation from the Committee, ably led by my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), visited Moscow, where they attempted to engage with the Russian authorities. Because of the current state of relations, Russian Government authorities were reluctant to engage, but the delegation acquired much other useful information on that visit.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine have undermined the post-cold war assumption of a stable Europe in which the military threat to NATO is low. The north Atlantic alliance must therefore restore its defences, review its deterrence and reopen its dialogue with the Russian authorities. The fact that NATO and the UK were taken by surprise by the interventions in Ukraine shows a failure to comprehend President Putin’s determination to maintain a sphere of influence beyond Russia’s own borders and to do so by force if necessary. His stance directly contradicts the rules-based international order that western democracies seek to promote.

Russia has become increasingly active not only in conventional warfare, but in unconventional methods, often deniable, which are designed to fall below the threshold that would trigger NATO’s article 5 guarantee—the undertaking to consider an armed attack against one NATO member state as an attack against them all. The creation of the very high readiness joint taskforce—VJTF—among NATO member states and the enhanced forward presence on NATO’s contested eastern flank are steps in the right direction, but our report warns that the VJTF was formed only recently and that its capacity to deploy the necessary forces within the required timeframe is as yet unproven.

The report’s recommendations include the following. First, the MOD should recognise the extent of Russian remilitarisation and respond to it robustly. Secondly, it should review the effectiveness of current deterrence policy against nuclear, conventional and hybrid or multidimensional warfare. Thirdly, NATO should determine whether the 1987 intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty is in need of repair or replacement in the light of allegations that Russia has breached its provisions. Fourthly, a timetable should be set out for the Trident Successor submarine debate and the decision in Parliament “without further delay”—indeed, that debate should be held before the summer recess. Fifthly, the renewal of EU-wide sanctions against Russia should be encouraged and possibly extended to a larger group among the Kremlin leadership. Sixthly, it should be accepted that

“it is perfectly possible to confront and constrain an adversary in a region where our interests clash, whilst cooperating with him, to some degree, in a region where they coincide.”

We regard the threat posed by Daesh, al-Qaeda and other international terrorists as a relevant example of the latter: the convergence, to a considerable extent, of NATO and Russian interests. I am glad to see the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), assenting to that proposition.

The Committee believes that Russian cyber-attacks across Europe and territorial seizures in Georgia and Ukraine may not be isolated actions and may be symptomatic of a wider ambition to restore Moscow’s global influence. However, because Russia is a global power, there remain opportunities for co-operation if we can but grasp them. Yet with relations at what the Russian ambassador to London has described as an “all time low”, our report concludes that the UK must urgently boost its cadre of Russian specialists. We must restore and maintain a high level of expertise for the foreseeable future. Given the current climate, the defence attaché’s office in Moscow, for example, must be properly staffed by the end of the year.

Since the end of the cold war, Russia has not been a UK priority and our expertise in this field has withered on the vine. The UK needs a vastly strengthened body of experts who can help provide an effective response to the challenges Russia now poses. We cannot hope to understand Russia without a forthright dialogue, and in the current conditions of mistrust we run the risk of blundering into conflicts that may be preventable through better communication. The cold war was characterised not only by military confrontation, but by the then Soviet Union’s promotion of Marxism-Leninism, with its formidable appeal to impressionable minds inside the Kremlin’s targeted countries. No such totalitarian doctrine applies to present-day Russia, which, for all its nationalist and expansionist tendencies, is itself under threat from revolutionary Islamism, the brutal successor to the equally brutal Nazi and communist creeds which blighted so much of the 20th century. Therein lies the basis for potential co-operation, provided that our dialogue with Russia is from a position of strength, based on sound defences and credible deterrence.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

May I say that it is a privilege to serve on the Defence Committee, which is so ably chaired by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis)? I hope he will agree that one thing that is clear from our report is a lack of dialogue and understanding between our colleagues in Russia and ourselves, in terms of not only language, but shared history. Does he agree that, in the light of the upcoming NATO summit, we need to review that as part of our wider engagement with Russia, including how it perceives the threat from NATO, too?

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, indeed, and I thank the hon. Lady for that. She is a tremendously supportive member of the Committee; this is her first parliamentary term, but she has made a great start. I re-emphasise what I said about the importance of dialogue with Russia. The fact remains that different societies develop at different stages and go through different phases in their attitude to their relationships with the rest of the world. One mistake that the west clearly made after the downfall of communism was to evoke a degree of triumphalism at a time when magnanimity would have been more appropriate. Those in the west make a terrible mistake if they fail to recognise that Russia is and always has been a great power, and what we have to do is reach out the hand of friendship, while trying to discourage those aspects of the Russian tradition that seek to dominate lands beyond its own borders. Russia is a pretty large landmass and one would hope that the Russians could make a success of running their own country without feeling the need to impose their will on their neighbours.