Ukraine

Bob Seely Excerpts

Wednesday 20th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Whittingdale]

The military hospital we visited is one of the main ones in Dnipro, and it is under tremendous stress. The people living in occupied east Ukraine are struggling to survive, in terms of both basic necessities like healthcare, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and things such as pension payments. The Ukrainian Government are attempting still to provide support to those people, but in terribly difficult circumstances, which is contributing to the humanitarian crisis.

The UK gives support to Ukraine; I understand it is in the order of £42 million, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development, but to be honest it is not enough. I hope that we look again at increasing our financial aid, particularly for humanitarian purposes.

We also need to step up the diplomatic effort; the Foreign Secretary is going to Moscow this weekend, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister has only recently returned from Moscow. We first need to urge Russia to abide by the terms of the Minsk II agreement; I very much echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) said about that. We need to allow proper monitoring by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the removal of all foreign-armed formations, military equipment and mercenaries, as set out in Minsk II.

In particular, I hope my right hon. Friend the Minister will condemn Russia’s recent decision to withdraw from the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination, which is a direct violation of Minsk II and will also increase the risk to the OSCE monitors there. I hope my right hon. Friend will raise that, or will ask the Foreign Secretary to raise it during his visit. As I said, I believe that Ukraine deserves our support, but that support has to be accompanied by further reform. It is a sad truth that, as in most post-Soviet countries, corruption is still endemic in Ukraine, although I recognise that Ukraine is only a 25-year-old state.

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

My right hon. Friend is right to say that corruption in Ukraine is endemic. However, to give that some context, it is also true that corruption has been a deliberate policy of the Russian state, in order to hollow out the Ukrainian state and to undermine and subvert Ukrainian statehood. Does he agree that that is an important point to understand?

[Mr Whittingdale]

That is a very important point and I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. He is more knowledgeable than I on Russian hybrid warfare, and this is undoubtedly a component. I am sure he will say a little more about that in his contribution.

While there are still big problems, we should recognise that progress has been made. In the last three or four years, the Ukrainian Government have set up three institutions to tackle corruption—the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption—which have brought something like 319 proceedings.

The Ukrainian Government have also brought in an advanced electronic system for the disclosure of assets, income and expenditure of public officials and politicians, which has led to 910,000 declarations from top officials. I have to say that I have seen the declaration requirements on Ukrainian MPs, and they go considerably further than the declaration requirements on Members of this House. There have also been reforms to public procurement.

However, while progress is being made, there are worrying signs that it is now stalling. While proceedings have been brought against public officials, none have really come to a conclusion; indeed, most are stuck somewhere in the judicial system. An anti-corruption court, which is an essential part of the reform package, has yet to be put in place. We heard on our visit to a non-governmental organisation, Reanimation Package of Reforms, that something like 25% of the recent appointments to the Supreme Court, which has been newly established with a fresh set of judges, failed the integrity test.

There is huge frustration among the people of Ukraine that no one has really been brought to justice, either for the crimes committed during the Maidan or for the massive theft of public assets that has been going on for many years. Most recently, and perhaps most worryingly, Reanimation Package of Reforms has identified the fact that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau has been attacked in Parliament, with attempts to curtail its operation through legislation. Its operations have also been disrupted by the Ukrainian security services, which are probably acting on behalf of the Government.

Those are worrying signs, and we must press the Ukrainian Government to continue with their reform package. That is essential if the Government are to re-establish confidence in Ukraine, which will unlock the investment that will give it an economically viable future.

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[Mr Seely]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine have more tanks than the British and French armies, and has he any idea where they may have got those tanks from?

[Mr Djanogly]

I was aware, but that fact needs to be well publicised; it is not known widely enough.

We must also be welcoming here to Ukrainians. The Schengen area has just awarded visa liberalisation to Ukraine. I accept that that is unlikely in the UK until we know where we stand post Brexit, but the bitter complaints that I heard from Ukrainians about the lack of efficiency in the existing process demand a review now.

The other key issue that came up during our visit related to the development of Ukrainian civil society. At this point, let me recognise that that is a different society from our own. Ukraine suffered greatly under communism; and, with its early-stage capitalist, oligarch-controlled economy, it is prone to corruption and political stagnation, in a way that can be unnerving and sometimes shocking to many of us in the west.

Reforms are being made, not least to liberalise and regulate the economy, and that has sometimes led to hardship for people—for instance, in relation to energy prices. However, it was made clear to us by many whom we met that although the Ukrainian Government keep saying that change must be gradual, large numbers of Ukrainians are getting impatient with the slow state of reform. I did not get the feeling that that will result in another Maidan-scale revolt at the current time, but it will be important that we do what we can to encourage accelerated reform.

By the way, I was very impressed by our embassy’s resolve and action to do exactly that. Let me recognise also that there are a number of excellent, reform-minded new and younger Ukrainian MPs, who see a better future for their country and are determined to fight for that future. We also saw some very impressive reforms, not least the local government and police permit one-stop shops, where permits can be applied for under one roof: because the issuing department does not directly interface with the applicant, corruption is largely stopped. So credit where credit is due.

It does sometimes seem, however, that it is one step forward and then one step back. The appointment of new Supreme Court judges was for the most part seen by civil society activists whom we met as a win against corruption, but reports came through a few days ago concerning the attempted suppression of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and its head Artem Sytnyk, which points badly. Given the problems with corruption, I would say that establishing a system of anti-corruption courts and ensuring clean judges for them should be a priority for Ukraine next year. Those concerns are shared by the EU, the US, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. If we are to help Ukraine, we must also insist that Ukraine help itself. Of one thing I am convinced, however: this is our continent, and Ukraine’s battles are our battles and part of the UK’s future. We should not be neglecting them.

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

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) for calling this debate. To give a bit of background, I lived in the former Soviet Union and then Ukraine from 1990 to 1994. I have been conducting academic research into Russian warfare on and off since, and in the last couple of years I have made four or five trips to Kiev and to the east of the country to interview academics, soldiers and other people involved in the current conflict.

My right hon. Friend is correct to ask why we should care about Ukraine. It has had only a modest impact on our imagination and for much of the modern era it has been part of the Russian empire, although Ukrainians point to earlier periods in their history as proof of historic statehood, such as Kievan Rus’ and the republican, egalitarian Zaporizhian Cossack Host, the Hetmanate.

I think we should care about Ukraine for the following reasons. The creation of an independent Ukrainian state was probably the single most important thing that happened after—or accompanied—the collapse of the USSR. It removed from the Russian state a population of approximately 50 million people, its main agricultural base and one of its industrial and defence heartlands. It completed the journey towards statehood begun by the Ukrainians in the 19th century.

More broadly, in the east Slavic world there are three states: Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine. Russia is now an authoritarian state and its population is fed a daily diet of illiberal and anti-western propaganda. Belorussia, sadly, is an external colony of Russia and Russia’s recent troop movements into that state are likely to reinforce that. Then we have Ukraine. Out of the three, only Ukraine makes any real pretence at being anything approaching a functioning democracy. Ukraine is the only country in the east Slavic world that seeks a role as a European state within a European fraternity of nations. Ukraine is the only country in the east Slavic states with a civic society that is neither being actively oppressed nor co-opted by the state. In my mind, much depends on the future of that civic society.

There are undoubtedly problems. Post-Soviet corruption has been as endemic there as anywhere else. We under- estimate the appalling impact of socialist totalitarianism on the destruction of human societies; my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) spoke about holodomor, the genocide of the Ukrainian peasantry, which is only one example.

However, it is worth pointing out that corruption has been fostered, in part, as a means of Russian subversion and control. The purpose and the intent of Russian activity in Ukraine, sadly, is to undermine Ukrainian statehood, and, indeed, a Ukrainian identity that exists separately from Russia. For many people in senior positions in the Kremlin, Ukrainian statehood and a Ukrainian identity separate from Russia is the cause of something approaching apoplexy, and touches significant raw nerves within the Russian psyche.

We see some of that Russian subversion in our own state, and I suspect we will be discussing it tomorrow, but in Ukraine—as various speakers have pointed out, including my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), who spoke with great eloquence on this—they are subjected to a much greater degree of that pressure. That includes the compromising of individuals and classes, and the diet of media control and messaging, which is not just up-market PR, but a kind of violence against the mind, designed to demoralise and disorientate.

In Soviet days, such disinformation, espionage, sabotage and occasional assassination were known as “active measures.” We are still reaching for a new name; some of us are calling it “full-spectrum effects”. It is the combining of these active measures, which used to be run by the KGB and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with other forms of violence, including conventional military work. Under President Yanukovych, for example, NATO assistance programs were halted, and the Ukrainian defence establishment hollowed out, which explains why the Ukrainians did so badly at the beginning of the war. Attempts were made to rewrite Ukrainian identity in new historical textbooks. Oil and gas were used as a means of control and bribery. Russian businesses were used to exert indirect control over the Ukrainian state.

On top of that, in the past few years since the Maidan revolution, we have had direct violence via proxies, some of which were local, but many of which have been controlled by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye—the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate. Pro-Russian demonstrators as well as violent thugs, the so-called Titushky, were used or bused in.

It is worth remembering that Russia’s plans at the time were ambitious and it was co-ordinating a series of uprisings in almost all the Russian speaking countries: Odessa, Nikolayev, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia. In many of these places the uprisings failed and were put down by the Ukrainians—not always particularly well, but they were. One should remember that outside Donetsk and Luhansk, the Russian attempts to subvert and undermine Ukrainian statehood largely failed. Crimea was clearly an exception to that as well.

There are some people who say, “Let’s understand Russia,” which I think is too often a code for appeasing Russia. I think one should always understand Russia, talk to Russians as much possible and engage with them, but I do think it is important to stand up to them and not appease them. If we appease them and effectively give them a sphere of influence within eastern Europe, there will be years and decades of instability, which will threaten us and cost us a great deal in time, effort and money. The peoples of countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon pointed out, are not just pliable entities. They do not aspire to be under the thumb of the Russians. There is a direct link between democratising and the desire to move out of Russia’s orbit, to be part of the west, to be part of a global society, to be wealthy and to be free.

Russia’s response is too often to blame the west, fascism or the CIA, which runs the internet, blah, blah, blah; it is never to examine the reason why people would want to be out of the Russian yoke or to move away from what has historically been seen as brutal and somewhat arbitrary control. Russia’s response to this, as we have seen in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, is to increase the levels of destabilisation and violence to force countries back to accepting Russian suzerainty. However, there is hope. Many Ukrainians now see their future in the west. Vladimir Putin’s greatest achievement in the east Slavic world may be the creation of a single, Ukrainian political identity.

There is a grand bargain here. I very much encourage the Minister to consider it, although I suspect that the Government will not make it. That grand bargain is as follows. We spend vast sums in war zones and they have produced little; I have lost count of the number of ridiculous and failed DFID projects that I have patrolled past in Afghanistan and Iraq, which stand like monuments to the vanity liberal imperialism. There is an opportunity as part of this Marshall plan to offer significant funding and support for a country that is near us and the stability and prosperity which would yield not some generalised warm and fuzzy feeling, but significant geostrategic dividends in terms of peace, locking in the post-cold-war world and extending the EU’s influence.

I am a Brexiteer, but I accept that many people in eastern Europe look to Britain and the EU as models—I do not doubt that at all. We spend billions on Africa and ridiculous sums on the EU. Can we please spend some bilateral aid to do something that will significantly encourage stability in eastern Europe and specifically in Ukraine?

I will wind up in the next minute or two, as I am aware that others wish to speak. The quicker that Ukraine reforms, and it has been pitifully slow, the stronger it and its people will be, and the better able to resist Russian active measures Ukraine and eastern Europe will be. The Ukrainians need to help themselves, but I believe that as part of a grand bargain with that important strategic country there is much more that we could be doing.

I recommend greater involvement, including greater DFID involvement, and working with the EU, the US and our Canadian allies, who are very influential in Ukraine because of the Ukrainian diaspora—it is not only in Derby, but in many parts of the Canadian plains—to increase our leverage and to offer a grand bargain to the Ukrainians as part of a significant geopolitical victory in eastern Europe.