Relationship with Russia and China

Bob Seely Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to develop separate but aligned cross-Government strategies for both Russia and China; and further calls on the Government to support the international order, working with allies across the globe to develop an approach to Russia and China that, whilst recognising their separate legitimate interests, ensures a robust defence of both UK interests and democratic values.

I will speak for 15 minutes, if I get that far, as I am mindful of others.

As of this morning, offensive war has once again broken out in eastern Europe, as Russian artillery and armour rain down on a peaceful neighbour. We have all seen the reports of columns moving from Crimea, of Kharkiv and Kyiv potentially being under threat and of bridges being blown up in Chernobyl as Ukrainians defend hearth and home.

This is arguably the first conventional war in Europe since 1945. The intentions of Vladimir Putin have long been clear: to control or destroy Ukraine, to shatter western unity, to build a new sphere of influence on the foundations of the USSR and to present the west as a decadent, mortal enemy of the Russian people and Russian identity. It is an agenda that is both febrile and dangerous, but sadly it is also very real. We have needed to understand it for some time, and we urgently need to get our heads around what is happening.

According to polling, the majority of Russians see war—and nuclear war—with the west as now more likely than not, which should be a sobering realisation for all of us. Russian state propaganda has prepared the population for conflict for years. The immediate news is clearly shocking, but I will still try to look more broadly, to talk about tactics rather than strategy and, where possible, to bring in China as much as Russia. People will forgive me if I do not always succeed.

Russia in the west and China in the east present differing but overlapping and increasingly significant threats. However imperfect our current global system, we have avoided major conflict, but that order is now under threat: in Ukraine today; potentially in Taiwan and the South China sea; and potentially in the Baltic and the Black sea in the weeks, months and years to come.

I lived and worked in Ukraine and the former USSR from 1990 to 1994, and I was fortunate enough to travel through the country for much of that time. I lived in Kyiv, but I well remember many of the places we are talking about now. I went down coal mines in Donbas, I visited Soviet dachas in Sevastopol, and in Moldova and Georgia I witnessed the first of the proxy wars engineered, probably, by the KGB. Many of my formative experiences as a young man were spent there, and I am deeply fond of the place and its people. What is happening pains me, because a KGB placeman will now pit Slavs against other Slavs to fulfil a fantasy about the Soviet Union and the world. The cold war was not a good world. It died 30 years ago and should remain dead. Tens of thousands are likely to die.

I would like to argue the following: the risk of direct conflict with Russia and China is growing and, in some senses, we are already in indirect conflict with both, in different ways—importantly, I am not directly comparing Russia and China. We are midway through a 20-year crisis with Russia that we are woefully ill-prepared for and have done our best to ignore. Frankly, this is now returning with a vengeance. We are at the beginning of a significant and potentially damaging change in our relationship with China—there may be greater opportunity there, but there may also be greater threat. Therefore, for the next 20 years the primary foreign policy goal for this country must be in old-school state relationships and the avoidance of direct conflict, and the establishment of working relationships with both, where we can, that are as productive as possible, while resolutely defending our values and our allies. I do not believe we are there yet by any means; and the coherence and integration of our foreign policy, and our policy in both cases, is not there.

Secondly, we need to understand the new world and the new styles of conflict being practised against us, and the new forms of covert and overt influence. Thirdly, as a result, we need to move to an era of “smart” containment, which is not only geographically based, but is a protection of our values, and of our IT property, our universities and law firms, and our City institutions and others. That includes things such as a national strategy council to complement the National Security Council, because frankly—the more I speak to people, the more I feel this—we need to relearn the arts of strategy and deterrence. We need to relearn how to use power properly—I believe we have forgotten that.

We also need to make provision for laws that we should have put in place years ago: a foreign lobbying Bill—my God, how many more scandals do we have to put up with before we realise we need one?; an updated espionage Bill; an economic crimes Bill; and changes to the libel and data protection rules to protect freedom of speech and to protect journalists from becoming peripheral victims of Russian oligarch intimidation to our freedom of speech.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I wish to add to this list, although I share in everything that the hon. Gentleman is saying. He is very intelligent and foresighted on these issues. Should we not also be looking at those who have dual nationality—Russian and UK, or Chinese and UK—reassessing and making them choose a nationality? Secondly, should we not be looking at everyone from China or from Russia who has a tier 1 visa and reassessing whether those should not be withdrawn?

[Bob Seely]

The hon. Gentleman make sensible points. I look forward to working with him on them and I thank him for his intervention.

Both the Russia and China leaderships see themselves as being in conflict or intense competition with the west. That may sound “hawkish”, but it is not designed to be so. It is designed to avoid conflict in the future by being clear about the times we live in. Let us face it: who of us today will claim that deterrence has worked in Europe? Let me remind the House that the best wars are not those that are won, but those that are unfought. Our greatest victory in world war three was that it did not take place, not that we destroyed our civilisation in order to destroy another.

In Russia, the security elites have believed for the past 20 years that they are in conflict with us—in a conflict of values and of information, with spheres of interest. President Putin alludes to a “western plot” that destroyed the Soviet Union and he sees “colour revolutions” in the same light. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev regularly warns that the west wants to destroy Russia because we fear it and are jealous of it. The Kremlin’s confrontational strategy to change the post-cold war order began with a reassessment of military art in the early 2000s, which was played out somewhat in national publications such as Voennaya Mysl, or Military Thought, and Voenno-promyshlennyi kur’er—or Military-Industrial Courier. The result of that debate was a strategy that has, in effect, aligned Russia’s two ways of war, the conventional and the non-conventional, and seen the west as a psychological, spiritual and physical threat. It is not fundamentally a military doctrine—the Gerasimov doctrine—as some people falsely claim; it is actually a strategic art, not simply a military one. These ideas have formed in Russia’s military and national security doctrines, written by those around Putin, where the west is the existential threat, spiritual and physical. Swedish academic Maria Engström has discovered that at its worst there is a disturbing narrative among Russian ideologues that links Russia’s nuclear arsenal and Russian Orthodoxy, known as “Atomic Orthodoxy”, as the “sword and shield” against the Antichrist—the US and NATO. We are the Antichrist. The sword and the shield are also the symbols of Putin’s old KGB and now the FSB. We made the mistake of dismissing fringe Russian philosophers as neo-fascist nutjobs in the 1990s. Given what has happened since, it is unwise that we do the same again. In China, party document No. 9 lays out quite clearly that the Communist party seeks a dominant position of its socialism over western capitalism. The language of win-win is for an external audience, for us. The language domestically is to win and to dominate, and again we should be under no illusion about that.

Whereas Russia is a declining power, China is rising one. They present different but related threats, and both, to a greater or lesser extent, use the tools of hybrid conflict. The principle behind this is not just war plus information ops; it is much more. It is to see state competition as Darwinian, with war as an extension of politics—as set out by von Clausewitz—and politics as an extension of conflict. The latter idea was peddled by German world war General Erich Ludendorff in his book, “The Total War”. China believes in something similar, as readers of “Unrestricted Warfare”, published in the late 1990s, will know. Our opponents are harsh, harsh realists. Their secret police disappear people. They are not liberal internationalists. Although they share legitimate interests, and we need to work on those legitimate interests, their mindset is different from ours.

Putin is a product of the KGB; an organisation involved in some of the greatest crimes in human history, but one that, unlike the SS, has never had to collectively accept responsibility. He is both deeply rational and highly irrational. Russian integrated strategic decision making is years ahead of the west. Its general staff is probably the last Prussian organisation on earth. This war has been planned for years. He knows that EU dependency on energy is worsening and he has built up tens of billions in reserves. I suspect he laughs at the ad hoc tactics of the west, where we ask, “Do we do a no-fly zone? Do we do this? Do we do that?” From him, this is, as Sun Tzu would say, “tactics before strategy”—it is “noise before defeat”.

Putin is also fuelled by a bitter and cold anger at the loss of the USSR—at the loss of Ukraine—which he cannot abide and refuses to accept. This is the third stage of the Ukrainian conflict. The first, between 2004 and 2014, involved economic and political tools. The second stage, between 2014 and 2022, involved those as well as paramilitary violence. In their hybrid tools, both Russia and China seek elite capture in this country. We know about Huawei and about the academics and the universities. Twice in this House I have heard the claim that Huawei is a private company. Anyone who knows anything about one-party states and about communism knows that that is an incredible and bad claim for a Minister, or for an official putting words into a Minister’s mouth, to be saying. Both countries use covert military force. Both use an intimidating conventional military presence. Both use culture. Both use covert control of the media.

So what is our response? First, it is to understand our adversaries and potential enemies, because they spent a great deal of time understanding us. We need to keep reaching out to their leaders, however futile that now is in the case of Russia, and to their people. We also need to have a conversation in our own house about how we clean up our own house—about the Bills we need to bring in, which I have mentioned: the foreign lobbying law; the data protection law; and the laws on economic crimes.

That is just a start. If Confucius Institutes wish to remain in this country, they must stop spying on Chinese students, and be willing to discuss Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square. If not, they should be shut down. Military dual-use work should be banned. Work for Chinese military universities should be banned. Recruiters for the Chinese secret agencies need to be exposed and prosecuted. Front organisations such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Association should be banned. [Interruption.] I am aware of the time, Mr Deputy Speaker. We need to become significantly less strategically dependent on industry and manufacturing from China, not least because of the environmental damage they do to our state. Globalisation has in many ways been a force for good, but we need to have a conversation with ourselves about whether offshoring so much of our industry is a good thing.

The military dividend—the peace dividend—is over. Spending 2% on defence is not acceptable. To put it crudely, we need a bigger Navy and a bigger Air Force. We need to rebuild our alliances throughout the world. If there is one thing unique about British strategic culture—one of the greatest things this country has done in 200 years, arguably more than any other—it is our ability to build alliances throughout the world. We need to be at the heart of the building of new alliances. Potentially, our second carrier should be part of the CANZUK—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and UK—fleet. Potentially, we should put a physical NATO base in the Suwalki gap between Kaliningrad on one side and Belarus on the other.

I could go on but I am mindful of the time, so let me sum up. There are two courses for humanity in the 21st century. The first is the western model of a law-governed society with politicians under the control of the people. It is incredibly imperfect, as we all know, but it is the best hope for mankind. The second is the new militarism of high-tech authoritarianism that is championed by Russia, and a little bit by China. It promises the data-inspired, artificial-intelligence control of populations. We need foresight, strategy and resolve to fight to defend our values and the future of humanity. We should not underestimate the scale of the task nor shy away from it. The defence of human freedom, wherever it is in the world—in Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic or the Black sea—is the struggle for our age.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me in this debate. As much as anybody in the House of Commons, having been chairman of the all-party group on Russia and being married to someone who is half-Russian, I have sought to understand Russia and the mindset of its leaders. What I am going to say in no way amounts to my approval of what is going through the mind of Vladimir Putin; I heartily condemn what has happened this morning. However, in this country and in the west, we think of the relationship of Russia and Ukraine in a rather similar vein to how we thought of the relationship between Germany and Poland before the second world war. Russian nationalists such as Mr Putin have a completely different mindset.

In his speech a couple of days ago, Mr Putin said that the Soviet Union “created” Ukraine, and in a way that is partly true. What happened was that there was a brief upsurge of Ukrainian nationalism in 1918 and 1919, following the collapse of the tsarist empire, but Lenin quickly snuffed out Ukrainian independence and in effect made Ukraine a vassal state. When Putin says that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, in a sense he is right because, following the partitions of Poland in the 1770s and the 1790s, Ukraine was an integral part of Russia for nearly 200 years. When we look inside the mind of a Russian nationalist such as Mr Putin, we can see that he does not recognise Ukraine as an independent state.

I have heard a lot of criticism of the responses of our Government and of NATO generally, but I think that nothing we could have done differently would have changed that mindset or probably avoided what has happened today. I personally think that the response of western Governments and of NATO up to now has been right and proportionate. What we have avoided doing, and must continue to avoid doing, is playing to the victimhood mindset of many Russian nationalists. They believe that they were humiliated by the west following the fall of the Soviet Union, particularly by President Clinton. They believe that Secretary of State Baker gave a solemn promise that NATO would not expand eastwards. Whether or not that is right is not important; they believe it.

President Putin has claimed, completely wrongly, that we are trying to make a vassal state of Ukraine, and he has used the issue of NATO membership to justify his actions. We could not have said to an independent country such as Ukraine that it could never join NATO, but the reality is that NATO has never made any effort to actually move this application forward. Indeed, the German Chancellor said only in the last week that Ukraine’s membership of NATO was “not on the agenda”, so when Putin claims that we are trying to make Ukraine a vassal state, he is lying.

What do we do now? I know that what I am going to say may not be very popular with some, but I think we have to continue with the strategy we have pursued so far. The Government have been attacked for the so-called weakness of their sanctions, but the sanctions they imposed earlier this week were only part of the story. What I am sure we will hear tonight is much stricter sanctions that will really hurt the Russian state. People will say that this is weak and that there should be some warlike response, and people will say that we should have allowed Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons, that we should arm the Ukrainians and that Ukraine should join NATO, but this is the path to war.

It is sometimes difficult to speak of a path to peace, but if we escalate issues and go into a tit-for-tat situation, then war can result. At the height of the first world war, the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg was asked how the war started, and he said that he had no idea how it started and no idea how it escalated.

[Bob Seely]

As ever, my right hon. Friend is making some very sensible points. I do not think NATO should be asking Ukraine for membership, which is a 20-year path, because it simply enrages Putin, and it gives him a chance to respond and to claim that NATO membership is imminent. However, there is a difference between NATO membership, which is a red rag to a bull, and ensuring that Ukraine is too bitter a pill for Russia to swallow. Arming and training an independent, separate or Finland-like Ukrainian army is different from getting into a position where we are in direct conflict with the Russians.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Well, I suspect that is what we have done. However, the German state simply sending helmets or a field hospital to Ukraine or our sending a few anti-tank handheld missiles will make no difference at all. I am not criticising the Government: we have gone through the motions, but the fact is that nothing we could have done would have been sufficient to arm the Ukrainian state well enough to be able to resist Russian aggression.

I want to say to the Government that they have to pursue the path of peace, and I do not think we should decry sanctions. Putin has now moved into the dark side of history, but if we cut off Russia entirely from the rest of the world economically, we can make a difference. I am sure what is going to be announced tonight will start the process of proving that the west can be resolute and determined that we are not playing to Putin’s war game and have never sought to make Ukraine in any sense a vassal state of the west. There was no intention—this is a complete lie—that nuclear weapons or a dirty bomb could have been restored to Ukraine. The Government have to pursue the path of peace, impose the most rigorous economic sanctions and not escalate to war.

My last point is that the Government should not hold the Russian people responsible for this. Most Russian people I know, and Ukrainian people, are not interested in this warped view of history and sense of victimhood. All they want is to get on with their lives in peace. They just do not want war: they do not want war between Russia and Ukraine, and they do not want war between the west and Russia.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Seely]

I am delighted by what the Minister is saying. I have just received news that the Ukrainian embassy is putting out a list of medicines that it urgently needs. Will the Government take that list seriously and try to do something about it?

[Amanda Milling]

As I say, I will leave it to the Prime Minister to update the House on our response to what happened overnight.

Through NATO, we will ensure a united western response, combining our military, diplomatic and intelligence assets in support of collective security. We will uphold international rules and norms and hold Russia to account for breaches of them, working with our international partners as we did after the Salisbury attack. In the context of Ukraine, hon. Members will be aware that the UK is working intensively with allies to ensure that Russia’s actions are met with a united international response. We are doing so through NATO, the UN, the OSCE and our partners in the G7 and across Europe. We have engaged with the Russian Government at every level, but Putin has chosen the path of destruction over diplomacy.

The integrated review identifies Russia as representing

“the most acute direct threat to the UK”,

as well as predicting that it

“will be more active around the wider European neighbourhood”.

It makes a separate assessment of China, highlighting the

“scale…of China’s economy…population, technological advancement and…ambition to project its influence”.

It emphasises China’s increasing international assertiveness and scale as one of the most significant geopolitical shifts of the 2020s. Consequently, our approach to China aims to promote a positive economic relationship, but one that avoids strategic dependency and enables us to engage where possible to tackle global challenges. It also addresses the inescapable fact that China is an authoritarian state with a different set of values from the UK’s. We cannot let China undermine freedom and democracy. We will hold it to account for human rights violations, whether they are in Xinjiang or in Tibet, and for the erosions of rights and freedoms in Hong Kong.

The Government are clear that in areas of shared interest, the UK will preserve space for co-operation and continue to engage with China and Russia, which, like us, have permanent seats on the UN Security Council. As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary set out in her Chatham House speech in December, we must be

“on the front foot with our friends across the free world, because the battle for economic influence is already in full flow.”

That requires a robust diplomatic framework that allows us to manage disagreements, defend our values and co-operate where our interests align, but let me repeat that we will not accept the campaign that Russia is waging to subvert its democratic neighbours.

As a P5 Member, China has a critical role to play. The UN Secretary General has said that Russia’s action

“conflicts directly with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”.

Just as China refused to recognise the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, we would expect China to uphold the UN charter in the face of this latest violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The UK is determined to lead the way in defending democracy and freedom. We will continue to develop an international approach that defends UK interests and promotes our values, including with Russia and China. We will uphold the founding principles of international peace and security in the United Nations, which all three of our countries are duly bound to respect and protect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Seely]

I just want to thank Members very much for taking part in the debate. This is a pretty miserable day for all of us who care about democracy in Europe, so let us hope for the best.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House calls on the Government to develop separate but aligned cross-Government strategies for both Russia and China; and further calls on the Government to support the international order, working with allies across the globe to develop an approach to Russia and China that, whilst recognising their separate legitimate interests, ensures a robust defence of both UK interests and democratic values.