Ukraine: Military Equipment

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My noble friend is quite right in that Operation Orbital was conceived and has been delivered as a training mission, again with the objective of building Ukraine’s military capacity. As I said earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, this is part of a chain of events—and this is why we are moving on to assist Ukraine with acquiring other support for its military and naval capability. We wish to support an ally and a friend and partner, and make sure that we can use our expertise and skill to enable it to be stronger—that is what this composite package of measures is about.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, capacity building is obviously important, but last week the Daily Telegraph reported the defence intelligence chief of Ukraine as saying that there were 92,000 soldiers massing towards Ukraine’s borders. Can the UK Government really help capacity building to the extent that that can be offset? If not, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said, can some other action not be taken so we can begin to look at diplomacy rather than military capacity building?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

Operation Orbital, the training arm of what the UK has been doing with Ukraine since 2015, has actually trained around 22,000 Ukrainian troops to date. Operation Orbital delivers tactically focused training to the Armed Forces, such as medical logistics, counter-improvised explosive device training and maritime and air domain training. We have other training initiatives as well. In addition, we support Ukraine in the defence reform space, and we do that with our allies, so a great deal of support is being given to Ukraine. We regret the attitude and posture adopted by Russia and urge it to de-escalate pressure and help to stabilise the region.