Bob Seely
Main Page: Bob Seely (Conservative - Isle of Wight)Department Debates - View all Bob Seely's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(2 years ago)
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Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I thank everyone on the Island who has been offering to take in Ukrainian refugees and helping out in any way with the aid effort, particularly Victoria Dunford in East Cowes, whose MAD-Aid charity has done wonderful work in Moldova and is now helping thousands of Ukrainian refugees in that part of the world.
Having served for a chunk of the past 10 years or so in the Army, I agree very strongly with what my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) said about his—justified—concerns about the size of the armed forces. There has been an ongoing debate about whether we go for mass and whether our enemy of the future will be a state or non-state actor, and the simple answer is that an armed force needs to be able to do both. We need resilience, mass and redundancy, and we do not have that. Our armed forces have been stripped back to the bone in part to justify cyber and all these new tools of warfare, but that does not excuse not being able to fight state-on-state conflict, as my hon. Friend says.
Indeed, as the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) was talking about earlier, we know that Russia has an integrated doctrine. In 2004, in the first stage of the Ukrainian war, Russia was using the tools of politics, oligarchs, power, information, warfare and economic warfare, along with espionage, assassination, blackmail and other things that the Russians have been doing for generations. That did not work, narrowly. From 2014, they moved to paramilitary violence, and that did not work either. Indeed, it brought the Ukrainian nation together almost more than any other event since 1991. Finally, since February, as we have seen tragically, Russia has gone for effectively full-scale conventional war. However, over the past 20 years, it has traced and used almost every tool of state power.
The Russians still believe in hybrid warfare, although in this stage of the war they are trying to achieve their political objectives using largely conventional means, which thus far is failing in sorts, but I am worried that a moral victory is not an absolute victory or a military victory, and they have got a significant chunk of Ukrainian territory. They have their land corridor. We will support our Ukrainian friends in the peace negotiations, but we know that the Russians will not give up what they physically hold at the time of those peace negotiations. At some point before any potential peace negotiations, the Ukrainians will have to take back that land.
When I was in Odesa and Mykolaiv the week before last, I was talking to the southern commander. For some of his regiments, he literally does not have a single armoured personnel carrier. He does not have a single infantry fighting vehicle to give to his units. He has three times as many men and women as he needs. He has almost none of the kit. Justifiably, all that kit is going via Kyiv, via the central Government—as is right—to the east. If there was the ability to be supported with enough kit and enough military equipment, the Ukrainians could open up a second front, and that would be of extreme importance, because they could potentially easily encircle and retake Kherson and move up to Berdiansk, destroying the Russian land corridor.
I worry about a few things in the coming months. I worry about the lack of kit, as I have just said. I know the Minister has the same list as we all do, but Ukraine still needs air defence, the infantry fighting vehicles and the artillery, hence the debate about 155 mm as opposed to different systems. I also worry that if Putin is victorious, we will live with nuclear blackmail for at least another decade or two. Moldova undoubtedly will be next, and then northern Kazakhstan, and then Russian-speaking chunks of the Baltic republics, so it does not stop at Ukraine, although it is the largest of those entities by far.
If Putin is not victorious, there will come a series of decision points in the next few months over whether the Russians wish to escalate up to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and I will be very relieved if we get to the end of this war without the use of nuclear weapons, because although much of what the Russians say about nuclear weapons is bluff, some of it is not. If Crimea was threatened, or if their seized land in Donbas was threatened, or if this whole enterprise of the war was threatened, there would be decision points coming up where the Russians would take that decision whether to use nuclear weapons.
On that point, I was talking to Fiona Hill this afternoon—Trump’s former Russia expert—and we were both concerned, as people who have been following the Russia and Ukraine for many years now, by the lack of thinking through of issues and of wargaming problems. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that at a NATO level, but also at a UK Government level, we are thinking through all potential scenarios in the coming weeks, months and potentially years ahead.
It is worth pointing out that this war has been proved wrong in almost every assessment. Putin terribly underestimated the Ukrainian reaction. The Ukrainians themselves did not believe the war would start for at least another six months. Germany believed it could prostate itself without any harm to the European order, and almost all nations failed to arm to deter this invasion. I worry that if we keep getting those assessments wrong, catastrophe awaits. We need to do the right thing, but we need to be assured in what we are doing.
The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)
I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their well-informed and wide-ranging contributions to today’s debate. It is right that the House continues to show its full support for President Zelensky, and while there has been disagreement, so too has there broadly been overwhelming consensus that the UK is on the right side of this, that we stand with Ukraine, and that we will continue to support Ukraine in pursuit of the outcome it desires.
The Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister, and Government colleagues have been clear from the beginning that Putin must fail in his endeavours in Ukraine, and increasingly other countries around Europe and the world are saying the same. That consensus is welcome. It will, of course, catch Russia’s attention, and no doubt it will continue to sabre rattle as a consequence. That international resolve is not something that President Putin and his cronies expected, and it is far more powerful than any individual sanctions regime or any amount of military support that the entire world has come together—mostly—to say that this is the wrong route forward.
We are now in day 62 of President Putin’s illegal and barbaric invasion of Ukraine, and the next three weeks will be crucial in determining the outcome of the invasion. Having largely failed in all his initial objectives, Putin has now directed that Russia focus on securing control of Donbas and connecting a land bridge from Russia to Crimea in the south. Ahead of their annual 9 May victory day celebrations, it is likely that Putin’s forces will ramp up their operations in a bid to secure some kind of victory that he can celebrate with a parade in Red Square.
Therefore, the onus is on the international community to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs urgently to defend itself by preventing Russian bombardments from the air and sea, as well as repelling armoured columns on land. As the Prime Minister confirmed to President Zelensky by phone last week, we are constantly providing more defensive weaponry to assist the Ukrainian resistance. The United Kingdom was the first European country to supply lethal aid to Ukraine, and the total amount we have spent on military support is now more than £450 million and rising every day—indeed, I had to delay the departure of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary from the Chamber, and I was grateful that she allowed me to go and sign off yet more support that will be shipped over the next couple of days.
This week alone we have delivered Wolfhound armoured vehicles, which provide increased protection for essential supplies, as well as 1,360 anti-structure weapons. We have also delivered a further 843 anti-tank missiles, on top of the 5,000 sent since the war began. They have been used to repel convoys of tanks to devastating effect. We have donated 167 anti-air missiles, including our Starstreak high velocity anti-air missiles, the fastest in the world at some 2,000 miles per hour. They have also made a crucial difference in helping Ukrainian armed forces to protect their people from aerial assault. As the Defence Secretary announced yesterday, we will be gifting a small number of armoured Stormer vehicles—those are Starstreak launchers on top of a combat vehicle reconnaissance (tracked) armoured chassis— which will further enhance Ukraine’s short-range anti-air capabilities. I see today that at Ramstein the Germans have offered a similar capability, which is very welcome.
When the Defence Secretary made his statement to Parliament yesterday, he mentioned that in 2020 we had agreed in principle to develop and sell a maritime variant of the Brimstone missile. Recently, Ukraine has been asking for longer-range ground attack missiles and the Government have been exploring whether Brimstone stocks could be released for such purposes. At the time of the Defence Secretary’s statement, we had expected that he would have been able to return to the House in a few weeks to confirm that that capability was ready for departure, but, such is the speed with which our technicians are now working and so effective is the partnership with industry that I am pleased to say that that has been moved forward. It is necessary to inform the House that we will be providing Brimstone in the next few weeks, probably while the House is prorogued ahead of the Queen’s Speech. That remains very much in line with our principle of evolving our support to Ukraine as the conflict evolves and its capability requirements change.
James Heappey
My hon. Friend asks that question having had a visit to Ukraine, and I think he has his suspicions that it is not. We are offering all the advisory support that we can on the Ukrainians’ logistics effort. For what it is worth, I think that they are doing an extraordinarily good job in a challenging operational environment with a huge amount of matériel flowing into Ukraine. Broadly, stuff is getting into the hands of frontline troops, but clearly, as with any army in any conflict, the logistics effort could always be better and we are seeking to support Ukraine in achieving that.
To ensure that the equipment provided is as effective as possible, we must also train Ukrainian troops in its use. That is why Ukrainian troops are currently on Salisbury Plain learning how to use 120 armoured fighting vehicles that they will be taking back with them to the frontline. We are also scoping options to begin navy-to-navy training ahead of the delivery of a counter-mines capability to the Ukrainian navy later in the year.
During the recess, the Minister for Defence Procurement and I hosted Ukraine’s deputy Minister Volodymyr Havrylov alongside Ukrainian generals on Salisbury Plain to look at the equipment that might be part of the next phase of our support to Ukraine. They were pleased with what they saw and we are now working with industry to deliver those capabilities. At the same time, we are still delivering, as hon. Members would expect, nearly 100,000 sets of rations, 10 pallets of medical equipment, 3,000 pieces of body armour, nearly 8,000 helmets and 3,000 pairs of boots. This week, another 4,000 night-vision devices will also be sent to Ukraine.
Our support does not stop there. The Ukrainians are most easily able to absorb former Warsaw pact kit, so we have been speaking to colleagues around eastern Europe and far further afield to encourage them to give up that kit with a commitment to backfilling from UK industry or indeed UK inventory where required. The reply has been hugely heartening.