Defence Personnel Data Breach
Bob Seely Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Grant Shapps
The MOD, as is the case with most militaries, uses a lot of contractors and subcontractors. Let me answer the hon. Gentleman’s question directly: yes, the review will encompass all that work, and if we believe we can do this better—many Members may conclude that this would not have happened had that data been held in the MOD and on our own systems—we will endeavour to do that.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
First, I thank the Minister for his call this morning. It is a little frustrating to be told that one’s bank details and national insurance number are winging their way to Beijing or wherever they have gone. Given that I was also caught up in the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China breach, I wonder whether I am in the running to be the most hacked MP in Britain.
If it was weak security with the contractor, does that mean it was not a state actor? If the contractor had a high level of security, do we assume it is more likely that a state actor was behind the breach? If there was a state actor behind it, do we assume that it is China, because it has form on stealing mass data and has done so from the US federal Government?
Grant Shapps
I thank my hon. Friend for his service, and I am sorry that he had to receive that phone call about what has happened. I stress that we do not believe the data has necessarily been stolen—there is a danger of running a couple of steps ahead. We have responded with the eight-point plan as if it has been stolen, because we think that is the best position to put everybody in, including my hon. Friend, given the seriousness of the potential breach. I will struggle to answer the detail of the rest of his questions for national security reasons that I hope he will understand. Once again, I undertake that the next stage of this, which is a process set out in the Butler reforms, will be carried out quickly and efficiently.
Defence
Bob Seely Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Grant Shapps
I think the right hon. Gentleman will want me to complete this section. I would be interested to hear him apply that commitment to his own Front Benchers, because this Conservative £75 billion rise in defence spending is highly significant. It is precisely what our armed forces need to respond to axes of authoritarian states that are trying to reshape the world in their image, and it is the right thing to do.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
Rather than Labour Members trying to poke holes in this commitment, would it not be better if they committed to doing the same thing?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend has pre-empted a passage a little later in my speech, in which I suggest that those right hon. and hon. Members on the Labour Benches who want to see more money go into defence might first persuade their own Front Benchers to follow our lead and ensure that we get more money into it. I am very concerned about the apparent failure of the Labour party to match our funding commitment. Labour Members are being incredibly evasive about funding. In addition to not confirming whether they will do the 2.5% in the next six years—we look forward to hearing whether they confirm that—they are also promising, or perhaps I should say threatening, a review of defence. Our enemies will waste no time in putting the UK in their sights if they think that the next thing that would happen is a multi-year review—a waste of time and money that should instead be spent on our brave servicemen and women. Labour’s apparent refusal to follow our lead and back our fully funded spending plans would decimate our armed forces by cutting up to £75 billion from defence.
Grant Shapps
The way the right hon. Gentleman tries to represent it is simply not true. If it were meaningless, why has his own party not taken the difficult decisions to get to the £75 billion which, to be clear, is the amount additional to what is currently programmed in? He is right that defence budgets may have increased over time, but £75 billion is still the additional figure. If it is so straightforward, why doesn’t he encourage those on the Labour Front Bench to do it? I think I know the answer. He asks how it will be paid for, and it will largely be paid for by cutting the civil service back down to pre-covid levels. Labour Members do not want to cut 72,000 from the workforce of the civil service so that it goes back down to pre-covid levels, and because of that they will not follow us in our commitment. That shows where their choices lie.
Labour Members say they want 2.5% and are keen to see that, but they are not willing to put in place the difficult decisions to reach that. By failing to take those decisions, they will be failing to fund our armed forces if they were to come into office. That would leave our nation more vulnerable, and play directly into the hands of our adversaries, including Putin.
In January, I set out a comprehensive case for increasing defence spending in response to what I described as “a more dangerous world”. After all, Putin is on the march, pursuing wars in the east of Europe while backing greater political influence and assassinations in the west. China has certainly become a lot more assertive in recent years. Russian mercenaries, Islamic extremists and military strongmen have overrun democracies and societies in Africa.
As Iran has nourished and manipulated its proxy militia and groups around the middle east, the Islamic republic itself has for the first time carried out an aerial assault on a democratic near-neighbour, Israel. Its Hamas terrorist allies brought mass murder to Israelis on 7 October, and they have brought pain to the Palestinians—both before and since—with the Hamas approach to running that area. Meanwhile, one of Iran’s other key allies—the Houthis—continues to hold global trade hostage in the Red sea. So, from Moscow to Tehran and from Beijing to Pyongyang, a network of authoritarian states is pressuring allies and our interests. Working together, they are more connected than they have ever been before.
Bob Seely
The Secretary of State is making a really important point. Without sounding too academic, do we actually know what war is nowadays? Clearly, there is conventional war, which we recognise, but what he is talking about is proxy war. Earlier, we were discussing cyber-attacks, China’s and Russia’s role in this sort of hybrid war, and the integration of military and non-military means, which is behind military doctrines in an increasing number of countries. Are we joined up enough to be able to fight these modern conflicts, which are part military and part non-military? Do we actually understand what conflict is in this century?
Grant Shapps
It is true—my hon. Friend will know this as well as or better than me—that in each generation the world relearns what it is to have conflict. We have seen that with Russia, we are seeing it at the moment in the middle east, and we have seen it, as discussed, through various cyber-activities, which are in fact entirely continuous; it is just that most of them do not succeed.
The world has changed, the defence reviews and the refresh looked to try to learn those lessons. One of the things, not least because of Britain’s forward-leaning approach to the war in Ukraine, has been that we have been at the forefront of learning some of those new lessons with drones and other technologies; indeed, we have been speeding up the introduction of new technologies such as laser weapons. It is important that we think about this as a whole rather than just through the traditional eyes of three armed services. We now have to think about space and the domain in cyber, and that is what our strategic command does.
Grant Shapps
As my right hon. Friend will realise, it is not a move I have taken easily. There is a balance to be struck between where the weapons can do the most good and the extraordinarily difficult fight that our Ukrainian friends are in right now. I thought, believe and think that that warrants the provision of further AS-90s. The new equipment, as I do not need to tell him, is vastly superior and will be in our hands quickly, not least because of the excellent work of the Minister for Defence Procurement, who has sped up the acquisition of new equipment through his brilliant integrated plan.
I want to be entirely clear with the House: there are choices to make when we do this gifting, and we have to make the choices as to where we think the equipment will be most useful and how quickly we can replenish it. One of the very good things about this significant boost in defence spending, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) will appreciate, is that it will enable us to replenish not only equipment but, crucially, munitions, which have been a real concern of his and many others.
Grant Shapps
I will make a little progress, if I may.
We have pledged this half a billion pounds extra, so we are at £3 billion a year. The crucial point—it has perhaps been lost, or perhaps I have not said it from this Dispatch Box—is that over the course of the next Parliament, this party in government would provide £15 billion of guaranteed aid to Ukraine. When I speak to President Zelensky or my opposite number, Minister Umerov, they make it clear that the certainty of that funding is the most important thing we can do right now. I implore and invite other parties to suggest that they would follow that pledge, in order to provide that certainty to the Ukrainians right now. It matters now that the Ukrainians have certainty that that aid will be there, come what may and regardless of electoral cycles elsewhere, even though we will still be here.
Grant Shapps
I think the right hon. Gentleman will now understand why I was so pleased to trounce the Liberal Democrats when it came to that election—to squeeze them out of government and ensure that we could get on with Trident as we always wanted to. I encourage his party to join us in that commitment, backed up with money—not just photo-opportunities in Barrow, but money to deliver the nuclear deterrent.
I now want to make some progress. I want to talk about Putin’s war, and the way in which it has underlined the vital role of conventional forces. From the Red sea to the skies over Iraq, our armed forces are already doing incredible work globally in protecting and advancing our interests every day. In the ongoing Exercise Steadfast Defender, they are currently making up 20% of this year’s NATO exercise, itself the largest since the cold war. I have been to visit some of them in Poland.
We are investing £8.6 billion in Army equipment during this decade to make our ground forces more integrated, agile and lethal. That includes the new Boxer and the long-awaited Ajax armoured fighting vehicles, as well as the new Challenger 3 tanks, of which I saw the second prototype come off the production line in Telford just last month—the first British-made tank for 22 years.
Our United Kingdom is at its strongest when we stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies, and therefore our commitment to NATO will only ever increase. That is why it is so important that we have been prepared to set out how to get to 2.5%. At the 2014 NATO summit at Newport in Wales, we set a target of 2% to be reached by this year; we are now extending that to 2.5%, and we invite other countries to join us.
NATO has become stronger because of Putin’s actions in Ukraine. It has added members: two new members have joined us, and we therefore outgun Putin on every single metric. We have three times as many submarines and fighter jets, four times as many tanks, helicopters and artillery pieces, four and a half times as many warships, six times as many armed vehicles, eight times as many transport carriers and 16 times as many aircraft carriers. But it is important that NATO works together and sticks together. It is also important that we send a signal to NATO that the second biggest spender in absolute terms intends to increase that expenditure—that has been widely welcomed by other NATO members that I have spoken to in the past couple of weeks.
The importance of that iron-clad alliance is the third lesson of Putin’s war. Since 2022, we have worked hard with our NATO partners to enlarge the alliance and bolster its eastern flank. We have also worked hard with our closest partners on a range of top-end procurement programmes, from sixth-generation combat jets with Italy and Japan to cutting-edge nuclear-powered submarines with Australia and the United States.
The fourth lesson of Putin’s war is that the battle in Ukraine has needed ever more innovation—new tech, new drones. As we ramp up our defence spending to 2.5%, we will put high-tech innovation right at the heart of our plans. I recently visited the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, and we agreed to ringfence 5% of the defence budget for research and development over the next year, and to improve our strategic defence research.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Before the Secretary of State comes in, I am slightly conscious that 13 Back Benchers have indicated that they wish to make speeches, so there will be an impact on the length of those speeches if we are not careful.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
I welcome this defence debate in Government time. The defence and security of Britain is an increasing public concern in this country. You said that 13 Members had put in to speak in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I look forward to each and every one of those contributions. We have pulled in some of the very best in this House on defence for this debate.
I start by paying tribute to our UK armed forces, who are in action defending international shipping in the Red sea, reinforcing NATO allies on the Russian border and protecting all of us in Britain 24/7. Our forces are respected for their total professionalism worldwide. They have a right to expect our full support, on both sides of this House, and in this defence debate they will get it.
This is an era of increasing threats to our UK security, our prosperity and our values. To deal with this more dangerous world, we need a new era for UK defence to deter threats, to defend the country and to defeat attacks. Over the next decade, we face an alliance of aggression from autocrats who have contempt for international law and freely squander the lives of their own people. With Putin’s war in Europe now into its third brutal year, the Ukrainians, civilians and military alike, are fighting with huge courage. They have regained half the territory taken by Putin and disabled his Black sea fleet, but Russia shows resurgent strength, with its economy now on a wartime footing and its Government spending 30% of their total budget on the military.
I am proud that the UK is united for Ukraine. In response to the Secretary of State’s invitation, the Opposition give our full backing to the Government’s increased UK military aid for this year and following years, as well as to the long-term UK-Ukraine security co-operation agreement. Let us take the politics out of this country’s backing for Ukraine. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) said to President Zelensky in Kyiv, while there may be a change of Government at the election, there will be no change in Britain’s resolve to support Ukraine, confront Russian aggression and pursue Putin for his war crimes.
That is because the first duty of any Government is to keep the nation safe and protect our citizens. The defence of the UK starts in Ukraine. If Putin wins, he will not stop at Ukraine. I say very clearly that Labour will always do what is needed and spend what is needed on defence. When Labour was last in government in 2010, Britain was indeed spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, the British Army had over 100,000 full-time troops and satisfaction with service life was at 60%.
Bob Seely
The hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) has done really good work with me on the all-party parliamentary group on Ukraine, and I pay him credit for that. Whenever we take folks to Ukraine, we try to take as many from the Opposition side of the House as from the Government side. The right hon. Gentleman says that he will do whatever needs to be done, but expenditure requires long-term planning, so I just want to confirm for the record that he is saying that he will meet the £15 billion of expenditure that the Secretary of State has outlined and the £75 billion of expenditure the Secretary of State has outlined for the growth of the armed services budget.
John Healey
I will come on to the £75 billion in a bit, but the hon. Gentleman asked about Ukraine. The Government’s increase in military aid for this year and following years has Labour’s full support. Every commitment of UK military aid since Putin invaded has had Labour’s fullest support; that will continue.
We in the Labour party have deep roots in defending this country. Throughout the last century, it has been working men and women who have served on the frontline, fighting and sometimes dying for Britain. It was Labour that established NATO and the British nuclear deterrent—commitments that are unshakeable for my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras as Labour leader and for everyone who serves on the Labour Front Bench.
We are a party with deep pride in forging international law and security—the Geneva conventions, the universal declaration of human rights, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty were all signed by Labour Prime Ministers—and we are a party with deep respect for the serving men and women of our armed forces. Theirs is the ultimate public service. They defend the country. They are essential to our national resilience at home.
John Healey
I said a moment ago that Governments and Ministers are judged by what they do, not by what they say. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and independent Library figures confirm that 18% cut in defence spending over the first five-year Government led by the Conservatives after 2010.
What signal does it send to our adversaries that defence procurement has been condemned by the Public Accounts Committee as “broken,” that at least £15 billion of taxpayers’ money has been wasted through MOD mismanagement, and that procurement delays to Ajax and Wedgetail are putting our NATO commitments at risk? What signal does it send to our adversaries when forces’ recruitment targets have been missed each and every year for the past 14 years, when satisfaction with service life and morale have fallen to record lows, and when military families live in damp housing and use food banks to get by?
Even after Putin invaded Ukraine, this Government cut a further 4,000 troops from the British Army, took 287 days to sign a new contract to replace the NLAW anti-tank missiles to restock our armed forces and, according to the National Audit Office, created a £17 billion black hole—the biggest ever—in the defence equipment plan this year. It is no wonder the Secretary of State wants to talk about the future, not the past. This is the Tory record of 14 years of failure on defence. Our armed forces simply cannot afford another five years of the Conservatives.
Let me say again that people judge Governments by what they do, not by what they say. The Defence Secretary now thinks he has the answer to every problem—a magic wand, a get-out-of-jail-free card—but the Prime Minister’s announcement last month that the Conservatives will raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030 is of course the same level that this country spent with Labour in 2010. Boris Johnson made the same promise two years earlier, and the Conservatives have not delivered it in any of the five Budgets or autumn statements since. None hit 2.5%, none reversed the real cuts in resource spending and none matched Labour’s record.
Everyone recognises that defence spending must rise to deal with increasing threats. We share the same ambition as the Government, and we are totally committed to spending 2.5% on defence. We want a plan that is fully costed and fully funded in Government budgets. Our armed forces deserve no less.
John Healey
The right hon. Gentleman knows the difficulty of serving in this House and debating defence issues from the Opposition Benches. He knows we simply will not have access to the classified information on threats, the capabilities we need, the state of the armed forces or even the true state of public finances until we open the books. Those are the sort of decisions that we will make in a strategic defence review within the first year of a new Labour Government. That is the way that we will balance the requirements for national security with the responsibilities for sound public finances.
Bob Seely
Is there not a simple problem here, though? Labour may be committing to a defence review, but that review will take nine or 10 months—maybe a year. That simply means that it avoids spending or matching those increases for a period of at least 18 months. That is a significant problem.
John Healey
I think the hon. Gentleman needs to have a word with those on his own Front Bench, because the Department is at the moment planning a fresh review, whatever the outcome—[Interruption.] Yes, it is, whatever the outcome of the election. The problem for the hon. Gentleman is that the 2030 target is not in the Government’s financial plans; it is in a press release. We cannot rebuild the UK’s armed forces, let long-term procurement contracts, deter those who threaten us or defeat Putin with press releases. If this 2030 plan had been in a Budget, it would have been independently checked, openly costed and fully funded, but it is not and it was not. There are more holes in the Defence Secretary’s numbers than there is in Emmental cheese. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has called the £75 billion figure “essentially meaningless”. The Institute for Government has said that the Conservatives’ 2.5% plan does not add up, and that cutting 70,000 civil servant jobs will get nowhere close to delivering the savings needed to fund 2.5%.
To produce his fake figure of £75 billion, the Secretary of State has invented a zero-growth baseline for the next six years, unlike and in contrast with the Treasury’s official 0.5% real annual growth baseline. To get 2.3% as a different baseline for the annual increases in his plan on page 20 in the annex of his report, which he likes to parade, he has added all the one-off spending this year to the defence core budget—that is £3 billion for Ukraine, £1 billion for the nuclear contingency, half a billion pounds for operations and £300 million for ammunition, all in the figures for each of the next six years. Finally, the Secretary of State has used a trick that the Government tried before, in the 2015 defence strategic review, when Ministers pledged to cut 30% of MOD civil servants just to make their spending plans add up. However, after 2015 and that plan, civil service numbers in the MOD of course did not go down to 41,000; they went up to 63,000.
The new promised increase to defence core budgets will not start until April next year. For the next 10 months, day-to-day budgets in real terms are still being cut, the Army is still being cut and recruitment targets are still being missed. Nine out of 10 of the veterans promised a veterans ID card by the end of last year are still missing out, and around 500 veteran households are being made homeless every three months.
Our armed forces cannot afford another five years of the Conservatives. With threats increasing and tensions growing, we must make Britain better defended. Labour’s plan for defence will reinforce homeland protections with a new strategic review. [Interruption.] It will fulfil NATO obligations in full, with a NATO test on our major programmes.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. May I begin by putting on the record the whole House’s thanks to the members of our armed forces for the service they give selflessly to protect us all? It is often said that the first responsibility of a Government is to protect the nation, keep it safe and protect its citizens. I think we need to look at what has happened over the past 14 years.
My hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) said in his contribution that the armed forces are being “hollowed out”—not his words or mine, but those of the former Defence Secretary, the right hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace). Have we got to that situation by accident? No, we have not. That has been a deliberate policy over the last 14 years, including the 18% cut in the defence budget up to 2015-16. Today, the defence budget is 7% lower in real terms than it was in 2010. As my hon. Friend said, we saw our armed forces personnel cut by nearly 50,000—they were not only cut; there were compulsory redundancies. If a Labour Government had done that, every national newspaper would have had a lot to say about it. One in five ships in the Royal Navy has been taken out of service. We have 200 fewer aircraft in the RAF now, and satisfaction ratings for service life are at an all-time low of 50%.
Is it a time for serious policy and serious money on defence? Yes, it is, but we have not got that from the Government or from the Prime Minister’s announcement, which is the usual smoke and mirrors. It is about soundbites that can be sold at the next general election. The Defence Secretary could sell snow to the Eskimos in his confident sort of way. I am not sure they would come back and buy more snow from him once they discovered what they had actually been sold.
If we look at what has been announced, an extra £75 billion is the headline. That will be repeated by every Conservative candidate in the general election, but we know they only get that figure if the defence budget would have been frozen for the next six years—something the Defence Secretary fails to admit. Also, where is the money? If my colleagues on the Labour Front Bench had announced this, straightaway people would be saying, “Where’s the money coming from? Where’s the detail?” There is no detail; it is just an aspiration—that is all it is. There is no separation between how much will be spent on resource and capital departmental expenditure limits. What we have from the salesman that is the Secretary of State is a whole shopping list of everything that will be put right by the supposed huge expenditure he has announced. It is pretty hollow.
Let us deal with facts. The Secretary of State does not like dealing with facts. It is like when he came before the Defence Committee. If we take the money to Ukraine out of the budget, the defence budget for next year—this was confirmed by the strategic finance director of the MOD—falls. The question that people need to ask at the next general election is: where is the money coming from? Why are our armed forces in such a dire state? We know the answer to that. It is because of the past 14 years.
We need to concentrate on three things: the defence of our homeland and the contribution to NATO, which has been mentioned; the capability of our equipment and how it can be delivered; and putting weight behind British industry and skills. The Secretary of State said earlier that the announcement meant a huge boost to UK defence expenditure, but the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) demonstrated what we have seen over the last 14 years: contract after contract given to the United States, without any commitment to UK skills. My right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) mentioned the case of the fleet solid support ship given to a Spanish shipyard. That would never happen in any other European nation. We must ensure not just that we have the right equipment and procurement procedures, but that decisions are taken to boost our armed forces and to help UK plc.
Bob Seely
Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that there is a balance? Clearly, one would like everything for the military to be produced in this country to support our industrial base, but at the same time we complain about procurement scandals when the kit turns out to be so much more expensive than elsewhere. We need a balance. When we can realistically produce stuff in this country, we should be doing so—obviously, I will make the case for radar on the Isle of Wight—but if we try to do everything in this country, we will need to increase the defence budget just to pay for poorer quality procurement. He does not seem to be addressing that point.
Mr Jones
I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman seems to be talking down the UK defence industry. He talks about radars in the Isle of Wight, which are some of the best radars in the world, but what are we doing? We are not giving long-term commitments to those capabilities. We are buying off the shelf from the United States and other nations. We are not just talking about buying British; it is about co-operation with our allies as well. The problem is that if we take a short-termist view, which is what has happened over the past 14 years, we do not get the commitments and the flow through of orders, nor the R&D, investment and certainty, that people on the Isle of Wight need.
The Secretary of State said that the UK is now on a war footing following this announcement. Why, then, did it take the Government nearly two years to procure the order for 155 mm munitions? That is not a war footing; that is a slow snail’s pace of procurement. We need to ensure that we get not only the finance and the increase in the defence budget, but that rapid throughput of work. That cannot be done just by placing one order this week and then leaving it for several years, thinking that somehow the defence contractors will still be there with their skills.
We need a thorough defence policy. One thing that has been missing in the last 14 years is a coherent defence industrial strategy. Even when the Government do come up with a strategy, such as the shipbuilding strategy, what do they do? The main argument for that strategy was that we needed to have a throughput of work at UK yards, so what did the Government do? They made an order where most of the work will be done in Spain. No other European nation would do that.
As has been said, this is a very worrying time, and I agree totally with my hon. Friend the Member for Halton that we need to make the case for defence. I have been doing that for 23 years in this House, as have others across the House. We need to make that case to show that the democracy that we take for granted is delicate and needs to be protected. We can protect it only if we invest in the capability to do so, because there are those, even beyond the immediate threat we see from Russia, who would happily see the precious democracy that we cherish snubbed out, not through argument and debate, but through violence and war.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
It is a genuine pleasure to follow my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland). I want to develop some points that he and my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) made. I will make a few points about deterrence, and about the type of warfare we are facing. I will say a little about procurement, about Ukraine, and whether we are in a pre-war era and how useful that idea is.
The point that my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East made about deterrence was profound: the fundamental problem of the past century is that we failed to deter. We fought two world wars and just about won them both, so to us they are glorious things. Actually, both were catastrophes, in terms of power and in terms of lives lost. Half of my grandparents died: my German grandmother was killed by the Soviets, and my British grandfather, a colonel, was slaughtered while leading his regiment in north Africa. Winning wars is appallingly expensive; losing them is a catastrophe, clearly. But even fighting them when we can deter instead is a huge strategic error. Fighting two world wars effectively destroyed the British empire, which I think was in many ways a force for good—but let us not go there at the moment.
My right hon. Friend made the point that even spending 10% on deterrence is potentially much cheaper than spending 50% of our GDP to fight an existential war for our future, which is what Russians are being dishonestly told that they face. Around the Solent—of course he knows this—are Palmerston’s follies, the forts to protect the fleet at Portsmouth, on the Isle of Wight and on the south side of Hampshire. They are seen as a colossal waste of money because they were never used, but I think Palmerston’s follies were wonderful because they were never used. It was about deterrence. We do not know whether they deterred anybody, but the fact remains that they were there and that fleet was not attacked, and we lived through decades of peace from the end of the Napoleonic wars through to world war one. I will come on to this in a second, but we are potentially entering a new period of great instability.
The Secretary of State talked about types of warfare, which is critical. If this £75 billion extra is simply going to buy another half dozen frigates that will survive an extra three minutes in the middle east, in the Red sea, before they are destroyed by swarm drones, there is little point having the additional kit. If there is any lesson of not only the Ukrainian war, but the Azerbaijani-Armenian war—the first war where cheap drones destroyed expensive Russian kit from above—it is that cheap mass kit is very good at destroying much more expensive kit.
As a power that seeks to use conventional force and that does not tend to think like revolutionaries, as the Russians or the Iranians do or as terrorist organisations do, I am concerned about the type of war we are planning to fight. If we are just going to buy more expensive kit that does not survive the battle, there is no point having it. We need to invest in the stuff that will not only protect destroyers and aircraft carriers, but enable us to turn the tide—to do as the Ukrainians are doing and to think like a nimble adversary facing a greater power, perhaps using mass drones ourselves to destroy larger forces in future, be they Chinese, Russian or others. It is a question of the type of warfare we are fighting.
To those of us who have read Russian doctrine, the first characteristic of modern conflict is the integration of military and non-military tools—information, spying, cyber or economic. This is the world of the 21st century, and the Secretary of State was right to point out that each century or each generation redefines war. This is a redefinition of conflict for our own era, and we are seeing it from China. The Russians are very conflict-minded, but so far the Chinese place less emphasis on physical, conventional force and more emphasis on the tools of economy, using Huawei, cyber-attacks and so on.
Even with China, however, if we are entering a pre-war phase, we see a build-up towards a potential attack on Taiwan in the next few years. How are we thinking about the type of warfare that the Taiwanese will need to fight to defend themselves? They will need not only cyber, to survive the first minutes of mass cyber-attacks, but mass drones to shoot down and destroy Chinese ships and aircraft if they attack.
That brings me to procurement. I am sure the Secretary of State was going to answer this, but did not because the Deputy Speaker cut him off when I was asking about radar on the Isle of Wight. Our procurement has to be smart. We have an absurd debate in this country: one minute we say, “Why, oh why, isn’t everything made in the UK?”, and the next minute we say, “Why, oh why, does everything cost so much more?” We have to get the balance right. We have to invest and sell stuff into export markets where we have that lead—in submarines, potentially in radar and in other really good things where we still have the cutting edge—and we have to be much smarter about what we do and how we do it.
Most airmen and most people in the armed forces would tell us that the A400 is a pretty disastrous piece of kit. Maybe they have ironed out those problems in the past few years, but most people in the armed forces would much rather have kept the Hercules and run it with, I think, the C-14 or the Galaxy—[Interruption.] The C-17, sorry. It is a beautiful plane—gorgeous. They would rather have the Herc and the C-17. We had a better build deal with the Herc in this country, but for political reasons we bought the A400, which is deeply unpopular and cannot do much of the work, especially in the more rarefied ends of the military, that the Hercules could do. It is about smart procurement—not necessarily committing to buy everything British, but committing to do as much as possible British, as long as it is also delivering value for the taxpayer. That is an important distinction.
Moving on to Ukraine, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Bracknell is right that it is shameful that the US is doing so much of the heavy lifting; it is appalling. He is also right about how little Europe is doing. Russia is gaining ground and gaining in confidence, which is a significant problem we face. An old friend, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, is doing great work highlighting some new tactics on the eastern front, probably the most important of which are the use of glide bombs and CS gas. As a chemical weapon, CS gas is low level, cheap and less offensive to humanity than sarin. By using it on the frontline, the Russians are forcing Ukrainian troops out of their bunkers and their positions, so they become more vulnerable to wave attacks by Russian troops and to mortar and artillery fire.
We know that the artillery ratios at the moment are something like 10:1, so for every shell the Ukrainians fire, the Russians are firing 10 back. That will soon even out to 5:1 or maybe 3:1, but the use of CS gas is still proving to be a highly significant threat. A question I would like to put to the Secretary of State is, although I know we are being generous and doing lots of great things with kit, can we supply gas masks to the Ukrainians? Can we enable British companies that produce gas masks to sell them more quickly to the Ukrainians? They need that kit. From what my friends in the Ukrainian armed forces tell me, the Soviet-era gas masks are not fit for purpose and are costing lives.
On UK supply and support to Ukraine in relation to artillery shells, I do not want to keep banging on about this point, but the more there is transparency of supply, the more the Russians will see that we are in this for the long term. The Gucci kit—the high-end kit—is important, but the stuff that is going to enable Ukraine to hold its positions and not allow a Russian breakthrough of the kind we saw in Kharkiv is going to be the supply of 155 mm artillery shells, preferably with fewer types of western kit. The Ukrainians are running 17 different types of artillery kit that use a variety of shells, which is causing massive logistical issues. It is a remarkable achievement that the Ukrainians are even doing that.
I am delighted the AS-90s have gone. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) said, that raises the question of where that kit is, but it has been put to good use. However, those barrels do not last. There are only two or three retooling plants in Europe, so why have we not opened one? The war has been going on for two years. Why do we not have a production line for artillery shells? Why are we not re-barrelling or offering to re-machine kit? If we are, can we say so? That kit is so important; it is the bread and butter of this war.
I was going to make another point, but I will not; I will wind up there because I am running out of time. Finally, on messaging, people think it is a waste of time trying to message the Russians, but I wonder if we should be trying to do that more. If we look at the number of people who are actively supporting this war in Russia, as opposed to people who simply accept Putin’s power, there are lots of people in Russia who seem to be sitting on their hands. If we can try to manipulate Russian public opinion, it would be to our benefit.
Ukraine: Military Equipment
Bob Seely Excerpts(4 months, 1 week ago)
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Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on international supplies of military equipment and ammunition to Ukraine.
The Minister for Defence Procurement (James Cartlidge)
The UK has been leading international support for the armed forces of Ukraine for 10 years since Russia first invaded Crimea in 2014, training more than 60,000 new recruits since 2015 and committing almost £12 billion in economic, humanitarian and military aid since 2022. From the UK-founded, UK-administered international fund for Ukraine, which has pledged more than £900 million, to spearheading capability coalitions, our efforts have paved the way and made a genuine difference. Our NLAW anti-tank missiles and our Javelins helped brave Ukrainians to devastate Putin’s menacing 40-mile armoured convoy, which was headed for Kyiv. We were the first to send main battle tanks with our Challenger squadron, plus 500 armoured vehicles and 15,000 anti-armour weapons.
Last week the Defence Secretary announced to this House a new package of 200 Brimstone anti-tank missiles, plus £245 million for artillery munitions. The UK will also co-lead an international capability coalition, alongside Latvia, to supply cutting-edge drones to Ukraine, in addition to the UK’s co-leadership of the international maritime capability coalition. The Defence Secretary has urged partners and allies to commit to long-term support for Ukraine. At the NATO Defence Ministers’ meeting on 15 February, the Defence Secretary and his counterparts from 14 NATO allies and Sweden signed an agreement on two new multinational procurement initiatives focusing on munitions and missiles. Spearheaded by the UK, these initiatives aim to increase defence industrial capacity across the Euro-Atlantic area, replenish stockpiles at pace and continue support to Ukraine.
Bob Seely
I commend the Government for their impressive record, but does the Minister accept that the equipment pledged by NATO nations is not reaching Ukraine in anything like the amounts promised? Does he accept, for example, that less than a third of the 1 million shells promised by EU nations have arrived, that more than 300 artillery barrels will reach the end of their productive life this year, that very few pilots are being trained and that the Ukrainians are perilously short of air defence? This is at a time when the Russians are on a war footing, with 40% of all their Government spending geared towards the destruction of the Ukrainian state.
Specifically, may I ask whether Defence Intelligence and the Government reckon that the Ukrainians will be able to hold their current positions, and if so, for how long? When will artillery stocks run even lower and fall off a cliff edge? Will the Minister confirm that we have delivered on all our pledges? I was in east Ukraine last week. Does he understand that, after the obliteration of the frontline town of Avdiivka, the Ukrainians are now asking which of their towns will be the next to be destroyed by Russian artillery, while Ukrainian soldiers die because they lack kit? Finally, does he accept that the situation is becoming acutely dangerous for everybody, with the forces of fascism beginning to overpower free states and their NATO allies? Where does he believe we might be with security throughout Europe in the next few months?
James Cartlidge
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend and I pay tribute to him and all parliamentarians who have visited Ukraine and shown our solidarity and support for our ally. I know that he has a background as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, so he speaks not only with the passion we all share but with significant expertise on these matters. He will therefore be aware that there is a limit to what I can say on the operational situation and being drawn into trying to estimate the level of supplies. These are all sensitive and important points.
I think we can all agree that what my hon. Friend says about air support and training is important. I was at RAF Valley recently and, as I understand it, we are providing 26 Ukrainians with elementary flying training. We are flying the F-16 and we have Typhoon F-35s, while other countries will be providing the actual platforms. He is absolutely right to say that air defence is a critical part of the conflict and we need to supply more. We have provided over 1,000 air defence systems but we want to do more.
On the overall position, as I have said, we cannot provide a running commentary on the exact operational situation, but we provide regular tweets sharing what intelligence we can. Fundamentally, my hon. Friend is right to warn all of us, and indeed our allies, of the risk, were the situation to be reversed. We can say with some certainty that when the war started, we would all have been surprised to be in this situation with Ukraine having won back so much territory and, frankly, remained in the fight. That is thanks in a huge part to the role of the United Kingdom, and we should be proud of that.
As the Secretary of State confirmed in his recent oral statement, we provided NLAWs before Russia invaded and have been training Ukrainians since 2014—60,000 in total—but I know there is more to do. My hon. Friend has a very good understanding of these matters. These capability coalitions—one on drones and the other on maritime— are a good way to turn the support that has been provided into targeted and effective capability on the frontline. We are clear that we need to do more, and our allies need to stay with us in the fight.
Ukraine
Bob Seely Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
James Cartlidge
Absolutely: I can send that message to the families—and, by the way, the hon. Lady has also made an important point in reminding us of the huge generosity that we have shown by taking in so many of those families, a number of whom are in my constituency. I can certainly reassure her, on the basis of what has happened literally in the last week. We should be judged not by words but by action, having created a maritime coalition that will support the crucial strategic interests of the Black sea. I am talking about access to the Black sea, security, and the ability to get grain in and out. We have also continued to provide those crucial weapons, including air defence systems.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I congratulate the Government on their global leadership, which we all recognise, but a couple of matters concern me. First, the importance of supplying basic kit has been stressed by Members on both sides of the House. The supply of 155 and 155-2 shells is critical, and it needs a long-term plan. It is great that we have supplied 300,000 shells, but the Russians are using up to 15,000 shells a day, and the Ukrainians are responding with between 3,000 and 7,000, so this is a massive artillery war. Secondly, Putin’s regime is gaining ground politically because the Russians are holding ground while they target western support. So the long-term supply is critical physically, but it is also critical in terms of the message we send that we are not cutting and running but are in for the long haul.
James Cartlidge
My hon. Friend, who of course served in intelligence, makes some excellent points. On the particular importance of artillery, I have already spoken about the volume of shells and the guns that have been gifted, but I should add the spare parts to support them, which are easy to forget about. I spoke earlier about the Ukraine defence contact group. I recently attended a Teams call with all my fellow Ministers involved in that, under US leadership. Country after country listed its latest gifting, including artillery and many other munitions. However, my hon. Friend is right to say that we need a long-term plan. I think there is huge determination across the west and all our allies to continue this effort. Of course it is challenging, but that is why we need to bring in that additional element of ensuring that Ukrainian industry can start to rise to the occasion.
Ukraine
Bob Seely Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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James Heappey
There are two parts to mine clearance in-country. First, there is the tactical mine clearance of lanes through which to launch the Ukrainian offensive. The tactic to which the Ukrainians have resorted to preserve combat power has been to clear the minefields very slowly, deliberately and methodically with dismounted infantry, in a way that those of us who served in Afghanistan or Iraq will remember as a tactic for improvised explosive devices there. It is quite something that that has been the tactic for clearing a minefield, but it has preserved combat power and therefore has been necessary. The other part is that there will obviously need to be a demining effort for the country at large after the war, and that is a concern for all of Ukraine’s donors and friends—[Interruption.] Mr Deputy Speaker, it seems odd to talk about the progress of the war and the atrocities when others are so busy in their conversation, but I am sure they mean nothing by it.
Despite the large numbers of Russian forces committed, they are not succeeding. Ukraine has had notable successes, destroying several Russian command and control centres and ammunition storage sites. It is difficult from the comfort of our position as observers to imagine the ferocity of the fighting and the sacrifice of the Ukrainians. Russia is suffering heavily on the battlefield and has taken some 200,000 casualties, of whom we believe 60,000 have been killed. In addition, more than 10,000 armoured vehicles have been destroyed.
However, the value of today’s debate is not simply to reflect on the tactical situation on the ground in south-east Ukraine, but to zoom out and assess the strategic scorecard.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
My right hon. Friend makes a valuable point about demining, but demining could be put in place now, and it is important now, because even areas that are retaken still have significant numbers of seeded mines. There is not only traditional mine clearance, of the kind that he will be familiar with from Afghanistan, but the use of artificial intelligence and software to predict how mines move and spread. That work can be done now—we do not have to wait till the end of the war.
James Heappey
I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s observation. The reality is that, as the frontline moves, it is in Ukraine’s interest to bring the agricultural land back into productive use as quickly as possible, and we have seen some extraordinarily innovative efforts to do that, from the most low-tech to the most high-tech. The challenge is that neither the UK nor any other supporter of Ukraine would want to put a combat engineering capability into the country, for fear of any miscalculation that that would cause. That effort necessarily sits with the non-governmental organisations, but there are a number working with the Ukrainian Government, some of which are based here in the UK.
I suggested that the House zoom out a bit to look at the strategic scorecard. As a result of Putin’s war, the Russian people are needlessly suffering, the Russian economy is faltering and we are seeing Ukrainian strikes deep into the interior of Russia. An aborted coup and its aftermath laid bare the nature of Putin’s regime and the strength of feeling of so many Russians against his so-called special military operation. It has become a standard line in these updates, but on day 564 of Putin’s three-day operation he still has not achieved any of his strategic objectives. Russia’s economy is failing, the rouble continues to fall and sanctions are biting.
As we have seen before, Russia will resort to terrorising Ukraine’s population whenever its battlefield objectives cannot be met. Just last Wednesday, a Russian strike hit a crowded market in the Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka, killing at least 17 people and wounding a further 32. Over the weekend we have seen sham elections run in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea, but, as the Foreign Secretary tweeted, the problem for Putin is that
“You can’t hold elections in someone else’s country.”
Putin continues to use food as a weapon to hold the world to ransom. Russia is using its Black sea fleet to attack Ukrainian ports with impunity in order to prevent the export of grain and exacerbate global food insecurity. I have travelled extensively across Africa and the rest of what is sometimes lazily referred to as the global south. Whatever Putin might think he achieves through the security conference he hosts in Moscow and St Petersburg, I am yet to meet anyone who is not clear that it is his attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure that threaten food security across the developing world. He is using food as a weapon. We encourage a return to the Black sea grain initiative, but we are clear-eyed about Putin’s actions and his likely intent.
It is self-evident that Russia’s behaviour on sovereign Ukrainian territory means that he is interested neither in finding a path to peace nor in stability in the world beyond. Make no mistake, the fastest route to peace in Ukraine and to security and stability for the rest of us is through Putin withdrawing his forces and ending this illegal and unjustified war.
The UK has been at the forefront of efforts to support Ukraine’s offensive. As the House will know well, we provided £2.3 billion in military support to Ukraine last year, and by being the first to send tanks and Storm Shadow missiles, we galvanised a coalition of like-minded nations to follow suit and come to the defence of the broader international rules-based system. At the NATO summit in Vilnius in July, the Prime Minister announced a new tranche of support for Ukraine, including thousands of additional rounds for Challenger 2 tanks, more than 70 combat and logistic vehicles, and a £50 million support package for equipment repair, as well as the establishment of a new military rehabilitation centre. We are also seeing increased contributions to the international fund for Ukraine. So far, £782 million has been pledged, and 10 contracts worth £182 million have been placed, to assist Ukraine in critical areas such as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, electronic warfare and air defence. The first deliveries arrived in Ukraine this summer.
James Heappey
I note the hon. Gentleman’s comment and pay tribute to the work of the group in his constituency. On a Government-to-Government basis, it is important that we are led by the Government of Ukraine and what they ask us for. They are clear in their communication with us about their priorities, and those are what we resource. However, I will of course ensure that his point is noted. In the meantime, I encourage the groups in his constituency to continue doing what they can in support.
We have now trained more than 23,000 Ukrainian personnel under Operation Interflex, with contributions and knowledge from international partners, as demonstrated by the growing coalition of countries now joining us in training Ukrainians here on UK soil. Nearly 1,000 Ukrainian marines are returning home after being trained by the Royal Marine and Army commandos during a six-month UK programme. That training saw the commandos training Ukraine forces in small boat amphibious operations and in conducting beach raids. We have also commenced basic flying training for up to 20 Ukrainian pilots to support the recent decision by Denmark and the Netherlands to donate F-16 jets. That, in addition to the ongoing work from the Royal Navy to train the Ukrainian minesweeping crews, makes the UK the only country on earth that is training soldiers, sailors, aviators and marines—something about which we should be very proud.
Bob Seely
My right hon. Friend is making a great speech, and I apologise for interrupting again and thank him for taking the intervention. Apologies if I have missed it, but when it comes to training people, is any thought being given to a Sandhurst package or starting to get junior officers through? One thing that the Royal United Services Institute has identified—it is not necessary to go through a year-long course to do it, but it may help—is the lack of junior officers, and of people with J3 ops experience and of putting together basic plans. That is one point that has been identified, and I was wondering whether my right hon. Friend could answer it.
James Heappey
My hon. Friend thinks deeply about the problem, and his observations are absolutely correct. It would be inelegant to reflect on the private conversations that we have with Ukrainian Ministers and defence chiefs, but I think Ukraine is going through exactly the same as any other country that has been fighting a war: it is very hard to strike the balance between keeping its most combat-experienced and battle-hardened on the frontline, in command of tactical situations, and bringing those people rearwards and making them part of the planning or training effort. That can have an exponential impact, but it is a very big opportunity cost to accept.
The UK remains one of the largest bilateral humanitarian donors to Ukraine. At the Ukraine recovery conference in London in June, co-chaired by the UK and Ukraine, we added a further £127 million of humanitarian support to the £220 million we have already provided. This week, we have proscribed the Wagner Group as a terrorism organisation, a further measure of the UK’s commitment to compete with Russian influence wherever in the world it manifests itself. Through our sanctions, we are frustrating Russia’s attempts to prosecute its war and hindering its efforts to resupply. The UK alone has sanctioned over 1,600 individuals and entities since the start of the invasion, including 29 banks with global assets worth £1 trillion, 129 oligarchs with a combined net worth of over £145 billion, and over £20 billion-worth of UK-Russia trade. In June, we introduced legislation to reinforce our approach by enabling sanctions to remain in place until Russia pays for the damage it has caused in Ukraine.
Russia’s failures on the battlefield demonstrate that its much-vaunted and much-feared capabilities are anything but. Russia has been proven to be an unreliable partner, unable or unwilling to satisfy export orders due to outdated and inferior-quality materials, alongside inadequate logistics and equipment care. Moscow is having to prioritise its own forces over its international order book. Potential Russian export customers see clearly the opportunity to diversify their defence supply and seek out the reliable and effective equipment that Britain and others in the west manufacture.
What is true for defence exports is increasingly true for all other exports, too. That matters, because Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine is increasingly costly to him, not just in blood and treasure on the battlefield, but in influence in the international arena. More and more countries in Russia’s near abroad are looking for other friends because they see that Russia cannot be trusted, while countries that have been in the Russian sphere for decades, and depended on it for their defence and security, now realise the need to diversify. That is not just in NATO, where Finland and Sweden have gone through huge strategic shifts: others around the world are doing likewise. The cost to Russia of Putin’s folly will last for decades.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
Apologies for my absence earlier, Madam Deputy Speaker, and thank you for your understanding.
Like others here, I spent roughly a week in Ukraine last week, with two and a half days in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk and Konstiantynivka—which was also sadly bombed—followed by two days in Kyiv, along with the co-chair of the APPG, the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), to understand the changes on the battlefield, to see what was happening in Ukrainian society and also to understand the Ukrainian way of fighting and how it is evolving, some of the Russian changes and whether there needs to be some tweaking to the support we provide—the training and other things that we can do.
I want to look first at the Ukrainian style of fighting. It is always a pleasure to listen to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Armed Forces and he will probably be interested in this because, as a former serviceman, he was used to the intense tactical battles in Helmand and Sangin, and we are seeing something similar in Ukraine. If a Ukrainian way of war is evolving, it is being formed around creative problem solving and around strongly empowering junior officers because they need to make decisions. There is a real mission command culture, which is radically different from Russia with its intense hierarchy that effectively slows operations down massively.
There is a volunteer culture and an openness about using external support—perhaps unlike the British Army at times, dare I say it—which makes up for the Ukrainian army’s size. The most obvious example of that external support and the volunteer experience is in the use of drones, which is well documented, with commercial drones now being engineered for military work as well. Other examples include patriotic businessmen raising regiments—I have had the pleasure of meeting a few—and the original use of commercial comms kit. When I was in an ops room near Kramatorsk, they were using gaming software to communicate with the frontline, their mortar positions and their drone positions. They had basically taken the commercial gaming software used by the shared gaming sites around the world and were using it in battle. There is very much an emphasis on what works.
There is also a focus, as I am sure the Armed Forces Minister will appreciate, on the tactical battle rather than on large-scale manoeuvres, which cannot be carried out because Ukraine does not have air superiority and its forces are faced with kilometres of mines in front of them. Perhaps most importantly, commanders are having to fight in a very economical style because there is not much kit. Long-range missiles are used sparingly. Even standard 155 shells are fired back at the rate of maybe one for every five or sometimes one for every eight. Russia is still using between 10,000 and 40,000 shells a day, and we really underestimate the scale of resource needed.
This is also about having to conduct assaults while minimising casualties, and it was remarkable how many of the military vehicles we drove past were medical vehicles. It was quite upsetting at times. Having to assault while minimising casualties means that the Ukrainian forces are not assaulting with a traditional 3:1 ratio. They are having to assault effectively while being mindful that the Russians can lose four people for every one the Ukrainians lose. If Putin were given the option of sacrificing another 500,000 Russian lives for 150,000 Ukrainian lives, he would take that, because that would effectively shatter Ukraine’s volunteer army. So there has to be an economical use of force.
The Russians are changing and learning. They are doing it slowly, but we should not delude ourselves that they are not doing it. I would that anyone who wants to know what is going on on a daily basis and to understand the tactics of the war reads the report by Jack Watling from RUSI and the one from the Institute for the Study of War. Jack has said:
“It is also important to recognise that Russian forces are fighting more competently and with reasonable tenacity in the defence”.
That is the critical point. The hon. Member for Leeds North West and I had a conversation with soldiers who they were saying that the Russians were fighting well enough. They were not dismissive of their enemy, because the Russians are dying in place. If they are retreating, it is a controlled retreat. They have a depth of defence that they did not have last September. This is a big argument against tactical or strategic pauses, or indeed negotiations, because every time the Ukrainians stop, the Russians will dig more lines. I see no evidence that a collapse like the one that happened last September in Kharkiv is going to happen again. I wish it would, but there is no evidence.
I spent about 24 hours with a unit called Tsunami, a volunteer unit out of Odesa with additional soldiers from the Luhansk area, which is right over in the east of the country. They are a lovely bunch of people and I am incredibly grateful to them for hosting us. I was in their ops room, 20 km or so from the front. It was a very professional ops room with lots of screens and drone screens, and we were watching a tactical battle as it was taking place in Bakhmut. They were using gaming software, as I said, to connect drone operators with small teams on the ground. In some places in these villages and streets where people are dying in large numbers, as has been happening over the last few months, the soldiers are 50 metres apart. Normally at a British shooting range, we start at 100 metres and go up to maybe 400 metres. On the Ukrainian training grounds, a mile or so out from the frontline, they are practising trench clearance and doing range shooting at 50 metres, because 50 metres is probably what they are going to be up against in and around Bakhmut and other areas of the frontline because those frontlines are so close together.
The command guys in the Tsunami unit had a lot of communication with the teams on the ground to walk their mortars into position. Their drones and the base were communicating using gaming software—there were lots of screens—to strike the Russian position with 120 mm mortars, reducing it to rubble. They were watching for the splash every couple of minutes, adjusting their aim until, unfortunately—well, fortunately, but sadly—they killed the Russian invaders. I take no pleasure in saying it, but huge numbers of Russians are dying, which is a tragedy for them on so many levels. The Russians fought until they were killed. The Ukrainians also took three prisoners that day, one of whom was carrying propaganda cards explaining why they were fighting. An argument is being put for why they are there.
During the 24 hours I was there with that one unit, there was one Ukrainian dead and seven injured. We sat down with the commanders and asked, “How much land have you taken, and what are your casualty rates?” We worked out that a man is dying every 80 metres or so. They are fighting and taking back their country, but every 80 metres, and certainly every 100 metres, on this section of the front a man is giving up his life for that small piece of ground, and that is not including the injured.
One of the improvements in Russian arms is the Lancet drone, which is now made in Russia. Some of us went to see the head of the National Security Council on Saturday afternoon, and it was explained to us that there are 490 bits of kit in that drone, 60 of which are still coming from the United States and the west. Sanctions leakage is still doing damage to the Ukrainian war effort, and it is killing people.
These guys are rotating out every 24 hours, and we went to see them in the house they had rotated out to. When the people we met the day before went back to the frontline, their soft-top vehicle was struck by a Lancet. One of them was killed, one lost his testicles and two others were injured. A price is being paid. There is no war weariness in Ukraine, but nor is there the early rush of adrenalin they had when the initial positions collapsed last September. There is a grim realism that this will potentially be a long war, and that tens of thousands more people will die. Even if we accept a quarter of a million Russian casualties, we have to accept that if Ukrainian casualties go above 50,000 it will have a phenomenal effect on that society.
On the military convoy train that we took back from Kramatorsk, I sat opposite a lovely guy called Volodymyr, who was going back to comfort his wife because his brother-in-law had been killed on the southern front the week before. We know that drones are critical, and the Russians are improving their drones.
I will finish with a few points about how we can maximise our positive influence. The Government are doing a phenomenal amount, on which I congratulate them. I have some mates who are involved in the training, and I was chatting with them the other day. They love training these Ukrainian soldiers, so this is not a complaint but a suggestion for how we can train them a little better. Ministers will know from their experience in Afghanistan that the OPTAGs—the operational training and advisory groups—went out into the theatre and continually tweaked our training. Every time there was a change in the Taliban’s tactics, it would come back very quickly to the training programmes that people attended. I wonder whether we can speed up our learning from the battlefield in the drills we are putting these guys through. I worry that five weeks is not enough, and I know the Armed Forces Minister would say that is what the Ukrainians want and that that is how much time they are giving us, but I wonder whether a week or two extra, with a few more significant exercises built into the programme, could help to keep more of these fantastic guys and girls alive.
Looking at that OPTAG experience, is there more we could do to get drones involved in the training exercises? This is effectively a tactical war of 120 mm mortars and drones, and sometimes big, fat, horrible artillery shells. The problem is that we do not have enough drones in the British Army, and we do not have the commercial drones that could help. If the Armed Forces Minister is minded to do so, I wonder whether we could see how we can speed up our learning from the Ukrainian frontline, in the same way that we did with OPTAG. There is also a question about whether we can further vary some of the special purpose courses we are doing for the special purpose units—I will not say where it is—at one of the bases that is hosting the Ukrainians.
There are a few little tweaks, but the head of the National Security Council also made a wider point to me about the desire for a strategic relationship with the UK. Having listened to the Armed Forces Minister, it is very difficult to argue that we do not have a fantastic strategic relationship, and I am mindful of the fantastic work this Government have done. Indeed, I pay tribute to Boris Johnson. I know he is not popular with some Members, including on the Opposition Front Bench, but he is phenomenally popular in Ukraine, where people still see him as the man who helped to make the difference. Whether the Opposition like it or not, the Ukrainians love us partly because they are very grateful for what Boris did. They want that depth of strategic relationship, and I wonder whether there is more we can do across the board. We have done huge amounts—lots of short-term stuff and some medium-term stuff—but they complain that not enough Ministers come out. They say that Tel Aviv gets bombed more often than Lviv. People can easily get insurance to go to Tel Aviv, but they cannot get insurance to go to Lviv. Is there more we can do on the insurance market? I know we are doing good stuff on the grain convoys, but we are not quite there yet.
The Ukrainians are talking about wanting a greater strategic relationship. They love this country, and they see us as their closest political and military ally, although they know they are getting more kit from the US. I just wonder whether we can formalise that depth of relationship for the benefit of both our nations, not only in the short term but in the medium and long term too.
Defence Command Paper Refresh
Bob Seely Excerpts(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Mr Wallace
I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s comments. We both went to Washington in 2006 to lobby for a waiver from the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and we are very close to getting it. That is my point, if you think this Department is quick and easy. I had hair back then. If we get the ITAR waiver over the line, it will be one of the things I will be proud of.
It is possible to have a global response force and to dedicate it to NATO. We allocate our NATO forces by giving them to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, but those forces are able to be used elsewhere, unless he calls on them. That is often how we do it, so it is perfectly possible to have a global response force, with elements of it elsewhere if it is not called upon by the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Of course, if NATO calls on the force under article 5 or something else, that will be the priority. Our forces, more often than not, are absolutely dedicated to NATO and the security of Europe.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for his impressive, no-nonsense leadership. It is always great to see a Minister who knows his brief so well.
It has been 12 years since the Levene report gave greater powers to single services, but we are now moving in the opposite direction, with greater integration, full-spectrum effects, hybrid war, joint effects—call it what you will—linking up the military but also the military and other tools of state power. Does the Secretary of State think Levene is still fit for purpose? What would he recommend that this House and his Department do about it?
Mr Wallace
My hon. Friend makes an important observation about Levene. I do not think Levene is fit for today. Parts of Levene have not worked. I do not see the TLBs, or the Army, Navy and Air Force take the responsibility we hoped they would take when their programmes do not work. Examining whether joint force design should move back to the centre, where these things will be at the core of the MOD, will be important. On other parts of Levene, it is important to make sure that the centre has a role in holding our armed forces to account. The Command Paper has a commitment to start reviewing that process.
Ukraine
Bob Seely Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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James Heappey
In my experience, applications from constituents have been dealt with—after an initial run of concern—reasonably well. The hon. Lady has raised the point, however, and I will make sure to draw the attention of Home Office Ministers to the record of this debate, so that they can get in touch to discuss whatever concerns she has on behalf of her constituents.
Since the start of the invasion, Russia has shown scant regard for human life, but since 31 October, it has sought to deliberately target civilians. Let us be clear: there is no military purpose in launching missile strikes at hydroelectric dams or in targeting the six-reactor civilian Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is the largest of its kind in Europe. Indeed, this latest escalation has only had a minor military effect. The reality is that such attacks are only a further illustration of Russian weakness. We know that its forces are being pushed back, we know it has lost more than 25,000 soldiers, with many more injured, and we know its capability is vanishing fast, with almost 3,000 tanks, 4,000 smaller vehicles and more than 5,500 armed troop carriers wiped out.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I totally agree that, from a military point of view, hitting electricity and water, apart from being incredibly illegal, is rather pointless. Does the Minister, however, accept that this is part of Russia’s two-pronged strategy? On the one hand, it is now trying—Surovikin is trying—to develop a defensible line, hence the withdrawal from Kherson, which is not actually particularly militarily significant, and on the other hand, it is trying to destroy Ukrainian will by effectively interrupting supplies of water and electricity. That is, therefore, an important political strategy that it is trying to develop.
James Heappey
I agree very much with my hon. Friend. He thinks deeply about these things and he understands well how to assimilate the intelligence that is reported in the media. He is right: there is little military benefit in that strategy. The withdrawal from Kherson, while significant for the Ukrainians, and I will come back to that later, is a consolidation on to a more defensible position by Surovikin. My hon. Friend is also right to say that there is an attempt, through the targeting of civilian infrastructure, to break the Ukrainian will to fight, but I think the whole House will agree that we have seen nothing to suggest that the Ukrainian will can be broken. No matter what Putin tries, the Ukrainian people will continue to stand behind their armed forces and Europe will continue to stand behind Ukraine.
Indeed, so disastrous has been the Russian military effort so far that President Putin must now rely on one of his few remaining international friends and call in from the Iranians Shahed drones. That is further proof that Russia’s own defence industrial complex is suffering badly from the sanctions imposed by the international community. Its forces are being attritted to the point where they no longer have the capacity to operate successfully from within their own inventory, so these imports from Iran become necessary. President Putin hopes to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people, but he will fail. Throughout this invasion, the Ukrainian people have shown remarkable resolve.
Mr Djanogly
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I will try to prove that point further.
Many of those in leadership roles surrounding the current Russian President, such as the Chechnya leader, Kadyrov—who suggested using a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine—espouse rigid nationalist views. They should not, and cannot, be absolved from blame for the invasion, as the term Putin’s war may allow. It is also important to highlight that many towns in reoccupied Ukraine now have unmarked graves resulting from murders perpetrated by members of the Russian armed forces: the Bucha massacre is a poignant example that we all have a duty to remember and reflect on. Reports are also rife of mass rapes, looting, torture, removal of children and confiscation of vital food stuffs—again, all deeds done by soldiers and administrators of the occupying power. It is clear to me that many people of the Russian Federation are up to their necks in heinous crimes committed during the ongoing war against the Ukrainian people, and the individual perpetrators must bear full responsibility and be prosecuted.
A case against those actively engaged in the invasion is clear, but what about the wider Russian people themselves? The problem is that by using the term Putin’s war, it is possible to excuse, overlook or ignore that the war, in all its gore and injustice, remains very popular among most of the Russian population. It is not just Putin, his cronies and his oligarchs. Some Russians, a small minority, have laudably taken a stand, memorably and notably Marina Ovsyannikova, who staged an on-air protest in March denouncing the war. Such defiance has, however, been more of an exception than the rule. Indeed, polling from within the Russian Federation continues to indicate strong support of over 70% for both the war and Putin among the populace.
Bob Seely
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, as ever. The extent to which the Russians support the war is a complex issue. He is not wrong to say that it is still very popular, but I just wonder if there is a slightly more generous way of putting it. There is a hard core against—very brave people, as he has outlined. There is a hard core for—the military bloggers and the nationalist community, who are becoming increasingly concerned. But in the last 20 years, because of the amount of propaganda in Russian society, most Russians know to avoid politics as an issue; they let the people in power get on with things. Does he accept the point that, rather than the war being popular, the agnosticism towards politics means that it is kept away from as a subject?
Mr Djanogly
I accept that it is a subject we could go into in some degree, but I would make the point that of those Russians who have been leaving Russia and going to places like Armenia, Georgia or the more than 250,000 who have gone to Turkey, it is by no means proven that they are anti-Putin. In fact, a lot of research says they are going to those countries because either they want to pursue their business activities, which sanctions prevent, or they do not want to be called up on the reserve list, not because they do not like President Putin.
What I am suggesting is that at some point citizens and leaders need to take collective responsibility for the actions of the state and the armed forces that operate in their name. For Russians, I would argue that that time has long passed. If we agree that there should be collective responsibility, we can make the moral case for collective sanctions—economic and travel. Travel restrictions, like those implemented by six EU states, are a more practical way of reinforcing the message of collective responsibility than economic sanctions, which mainly apply only to wealthier people.
As the situation stands, at the end of the war, whenever that may be or indeed before, assets that have been frozen, across the west and other areas of the globe, will be reclaimed by their owners, including here in the United Kingdom. The public, including many constituents in Huntingdon who I have corresponded with about the situation in Ukraine, naturally assume that a frozen superyacht owned by a sanctioned individual will be sold, with the proceeds used for reconstruction. We are talking about some £18 billion of frozen assets, not including real estate, in the UK alone. That is not, alas, currently the case. If the situation is not remedied, an embarrassing political situation, not to mention a morally dubious one, beckons.
Ministers should be prepared to consider, working with our allies, how frozen assets can be legally seized, sold and the revenue put to work for Ukraine’s rebuilding. The World Bank’s assessment made in September is that Ukraine will need $349 billion for recovery and reconstruction. It is worth saying that it is not just a question of law changes, but adopting a more aggressive attitude within the existing system. For instance, when the FBI boarded Mr Kerimov’s yacht Amadea in Fiji, it looks like the United States used the oligarch’s maintenance of the yacht as a criminal breach of sanctions, thereby allowing confiscation. We could and should be more assertive than we are.
As for possible law changes to facilitate confiscation, the first is a revisiting of the Trading with the Enemy Act 1939. During the second world war, that Act allowed the Government of the day to confiscate assets owned by residents of enemy countries in British territories. It focuses squarely on the assets of any person or organisation of countries with which the United Kingdom is at war. Thankfully, there has not been much cause to review it since 1945. An amendment to the definition of war, however, could provide a valuable basis for considering how Russian assets could be seized for the benefit of Ukraine and its reconstruction.
Secondly, Canada’s Budget Implementation Act 2022, which was passed in June, includes amendments that allow for the forfeiture of property that is subject to a seizure or restraint order under the Special Economic Measures Act 1992 and the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (Sergei Magnitsky Law) 2017. That is done under both regimes using forfeiture orders, allowing the relevant Canadian Government Minister to apply to a court to forfeit assets that have already been seized or frozen. A number of safeguards are rightly built into the legislation. For instance, any person who appears to have an interest in the property may be heard by the relevant court.
A further possible avenue that I wish to highlight is one proposed by the Washington DC-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, which formulated a multilateral action model on reparations. In the model, the institute draws 13 convincing conclusions that lay the basis for an international, effective and legal reparations and compensation scheme. The model builds on the relatively recent and practical example of the Kuwait compensation fund, which, together with the UN compensation commission, paid some $52 billion in compensation to 1.5 million claimants over 30 years following the Iraqi invasion in 1990. The establishment of the fund and commission was possible only due to the agreement of those nations with a permanent seat at the UN Security Council. Unfortunately, as Russia is an aggressor in the case of Ukraine, that exact road map cannot be followed. The institute therefore makes the argument for working through the UN General Assembly rather than the Security Council.
The avenues that I have highlighted are but a number that are worthy of wider consideration—there are others. It is crucial, however, that the conversation surrounding compensation and reparations now begins in earnest, because just to continue saying, “This is only Putin’s war” is no longer relevant or morally sustainable.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I will not try the House’s patience for too long; I just want to make some general points.
The Minister was completely right when he said that the Kherson victory was enormously important, regardless of whether it was significant in military terms or symbolically. He made the point that it is difficult for someone to invade a country if they are going backwards, as we can all agree. Although it is symbolically dreadful, I would say that it is not yet a military game changer.
To build on my question to the Minister, the current Russian strategy seems to be two-pronged. First, Surovikin, with his Syrian experience, has said to the Russian Ministry of Defence, “Give me a line that I can hold.” Because Kherson is on the western bank of the Dnipro, it was simply not holdable: it was a death trap and a disaster waiting for the Russian military. By pulling out of Kherson city and going over to the eastern bank of the Dnipro, Surovikin has effectively put the Dnipro river between himself and the Ukrainians.
I lived in Ukraine from 1990 to 1995. For those who do not know the geography of Ukraine, the Dnipro river from south of Kherson all the way up to Zaporizhzhia is 0.5 km at its thinnest. If we add the waterbanks, the Konka river, the marshland and the open grassland, it is a minimum of 3 km wide. Up at Zaporizhzhia, where the nuclear power plant is, it is more of a lake; it is 10 km to 12 km wide. By moving his forces to the eastern bank of the Dnipro, Surovikin has effectively made the Dnipro a considerable buffer between himself and the Ukrainian forces.
Realistically, a Ukrainian advance is not going to happen south of Zaporizhzhia, simply because of the geography—one might as well try to cross the channel. It cannot be done without phenomenal resources. It involves going across significant open territory. The casualty rate, even against forces as disorganised and demoralised as Russia’s, would simply not be acceptable. It would fail, and it would be a significant counter to the Ukrainians. By getting the Dnipro on the right side of him, Surovikin now has a defensible line all the way up to Zaporizhzhia.
The second thing that Surovikin has done is to prioritise the destruction of civilian morale. Sadly, those of us who followed him in Syria know that that is par for the course. One of the really awful and depressing things in Syria was that the Syrians and their backers from Russia, which is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, prioritised the destruction of civilian targets. Most importantly and most tragically—I have talked to many Syrian doctors about this—the Russians targeted hospitals for destruction. Destroying the hospitals first destroyed popular morale. Men would fight as long as their women and their families stayed, but for that to happen they needed some kind of food supply and they needed hospitals. Destroying hospitals meant that women and children fled. Without the women and children, men were effectively pulled back as well. Destroying civilian infrastructure destroyed morale.
There was another thing that the Syrians and their Russian backers did. For four years Aleppo had been bombed, and for four years it had survived: civilian life, in bizarre and horrendous circumstances, continued. Then the Syrians and their Russian backers used chemical weapons for 17 days and cleared the city. There were four years of bombardment and there were attacks on hospitals, which took a few months to clear civilian populations, but what cleared the city pretty much overnight was the use of chemical weapons.
I raise that point because the Russians are still making accusations against the Ukrainians and the Americans about bioterrorism, and we know that they are still talking about nuclear. The Russians are still holding out the option of using chemical and nuclear weapons. We should not simply dismiss that as bluff. It may well be bluff, but we do not know that—we cannot tell.
Those are the two prongs of the Russians’ strategy: getting a line that they think is defensible, and destroying civilian infrastructure. The current phase of the war started back in September, when I was in Ukraine with several hon. Members present; it is good to see them in the Chamber today. We saw Zelensky on the Sunday, and the Ukrainians were overjoyed because of the collapse of the Kharkiv positions. We were there as it was happening. That was the beginning of the new phase, in which the Russians realised that they could not win. That was the weekend when the Ukrainians thought, “Actually, we can win this war.” It was a very important moment.
By having a defensible line and attacking civilian infrastructure, the Russians bought some time—they probably bought themselves a few months. The next phase of the war will probably take place in the spring, when Russian positions come under significant pressure. If my understanding is correct, they will come under pressure in the south between Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk or in the east around the Luhansk area. The Ukrainians may try a feint to the south while attacking Donbas, because that is where their best armour is. Either way, when the new phase happens, with a spring offensive or potentially a late winter offensive, what we will witness—if we do witness it—will be the collapse of Russian positions.
The critical point for the strategy in the war is not necessarily securing a defeat in Donbas, which would be great for the Ukrainians, but the collapse of the land corridor between Crimea and Donetsk. If that happened, it would be the beginning of the end for the Russians. They could continue to hold the area of Donbas that they seized in 2014, and it would not make much difference; they could keep hold of Crimea, which I think will be last to go; but the destruction of the land corridor will mean the final defeat, or entering the endgame. It will be the beginning of the end for the Russian forces if that land corridor goes.
At that point, Putin will face a series of very important decision points, to use a military term. Does he go nuclear? Does he not? Does he use chemicals? Does he not? Does he blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station? Does he not? Those questions will become critical, because Russian military defeat in war often signals the collapse of a regime. People like the KGB or the FSB—whatever they are calling themselves now—do not distinguish between collapse of the state and collapse of the regime. Collapse of the regime and collapse of the state are not identical, but they are much closer than they would be in our country.
Of the wars that the Russians have fought in the past 200 years, they won the Napoleonic war and world war two, but pretty much every other war they have lost, resulting in the collapse or significant reform of the Russian state. The Crimean war resulted in the end of serfdom. The Russian-Japanese war resulted in the 1905 revolution. The horrors of world war one resulted in the appalling disasters of the Bolshevik revolution. The Finnish war could have gone very badly wrong in 1940. The Afghan war heralded the end of the Soviet Union.
When this war is lost by the Russian state, we will have to start asking ourselves how desperate Putin will be and what will happen internally to Russia. On Wednesday morning, for those who are interested, Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov will be talking to the all-party parliamentary group on Russia about the potential for the collapse of the Russian state.
There are clearly some significant decisions to be made. Internally, Putin has arrested, murdered, killed off and imprisoned many of his opponents—most noticeably Navalny, whose health may or may not be slowly worsening in the penal colony where he is doing nine years. Putin does not face pressure from the democratic bloc, but he does face pressure from two groups and it is worth paying attention to them both.
One group is the nationalist-fascist military blogger community. These are people who have been very vocal; importantly, the state allows them to be vocal because they were significant supporters of the war. We know from reading sites such as Telegram, where they have half a million followers, that they are now despairing and calling for firmer, tougher action. Some public figures, such as Prigozhin, who runs the Wagner mercenary group, and the Chechen head, whose name I have temporarily forgotten, are also outliers in attacking bits of the military, various generals who displease them or the Russian Ministry of Defence. There is a problem building up in the nationalist-fascist community within Russia.
There is also a problem building up with the wives, mothers and partners of soldiers killed and injured. I have met on many occasions the mothers of soldiers in the Afghan war—a wonderful group of people. They fought very movingly for the memory of their kids; it was really sad to see. The number of Russians dead or seriously injured is probably pushing 100,000, which means 100,000 wives, partners, girlfriends, occasionally boyfriends, and mums and dads. That is a significant potential audience. The new soldiers’ mums and soldiers’ wives have not made common cause with the democratic faction, which is pretty much non-existent in Russia, and they have not yet made common cause with the nationalist-fascist blogger group, which I think would be difficult. Those are the two groups that I think Putin will be looking most nervously at.
Thank you for letting me speak for so long, Mr Deputy Speaker. Let me now sum up the position. We have to start thinking about the endgame, because it will probably begin in the spring. Then we will have to start thinking about what will happen with nuclear decision points, and then we will have to start thinking about, potentially, the failure of Russia and what the disaster of a chaotic nuclear-powered Russia looks like—so there is much to do. I congratulate the Government on almost all they have done. I would just say that I think a bit more integration across Government Departments is always needed and we still do not have that.
When it comes to diplomacy—I asked the Foreign Secretary about this earlier—the United States and the United Kingdom have the best diplomatic networks in the developing world, while Ukraine has very few such networks and they are modest, certainly by comparison with ours. There is much more that the US and the UK can do systemically across Asia and Africa to make sure that we partner with the Ukrainians so that they can make their case. Those are the nations that are receiving grain from the Ukrainians and they want to know where it is. We must ensure that they know it is the Russians who are the problem in that regard and not the Ukrainians, but those are also the people who are most neutral to what the Russians are doing. We have to start to get them onside and get that community built.
On Wednesday evening this week, the Magnitsky awards will be presented, in memory of Sergei Magnitsky, beaten to death 13 years ago on Wednesday by agents of the Russian state because he was exposed while trying to investigate a $250 million Russian fraud. We remember people like Magnitsky, but we also remember many of those human rights activists. It would be great to see more non-aligned and neutral countries, and countries in Asia and Africa, bringing in their own Magnitsky laws so that they can start prosecuting these bad people, whether they are in Russia, in Iran or, indeed, in China—but that is a discussion for another day.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Leo Docherty)
I am honoured to wind up this passionate, constructive and positive debate. I am grateful to all who have contributed. I will try to cover off as many points as possible in the brief time I have.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) for pointing out that this is day 264 of this brutal and illegal conflict. Of course, Putin has strengthened, not weakened, the western alliance. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his reassurance of support for the Government’s position. He made some interesting reflections on the utility of Operation Interflex and the remarkable training that we are doing, with our allies, for our Ukrainian friends. He pointed out the need for resolve, and we are resolute.
The hon. Gentleman appealed for a long-term plan. I can give him the assurance that we do have a long-term plan. We have announced that, next year, we will match or exceed the £2.3 billion that we have put into military assistance next year. Of course, we will underwrite and grant in excess of £1.5 billion of humanitarian and fiscal aid to our Ukrainian friends through the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Leo Docherty
My hon. Friend will have noted that the Minister for Defence Procurement was on the Front Bench earlier and we were discussing exactly that point.
The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport asked for a refresh of the integrated review. I will not give a running commentary, but we should remember that the integrated review was basically proved right. We are refreshing it—it is an organic, evolving document and it is in good shape. He mentioned NLAW production, which is a valuable point; we are working with industry to ensure that there is a pipeline.
The hon. Gentleman made a valuable point about dual-use technology. I am reassured that our sanctions provisions cover that, but I will look at that RUSI report and ask my MOD colleague, the Minister for Defence Procurement, to reply on that important report.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned war crimes. Two weeks ago, I was at the Hague meeting the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who has the bit between his teeth. Clearly, he is independent, but we will support him institutionally as much as we can to hold those who are prosecuting war crimes to account not just for reasons of natural justice, but to deter any further possible war crimes.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the humanitarian crisis that will surely emerge this winter. We are pleased to be providing £220 million of humanitarian aid and, of course, 850 generators to keep homes warm. He mentioned the defence budget. I will not speculate from the Dispatch Box about events this Thursday. I know that he will be patient in waiting to hear the detail that will be laid out then.
Moving on, my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) spoke interestingly of his visit to Ukraine. He shared some interesting reflections on the nature of Russian leadership and on the fact that no Putin does not necessarily mean no war—I thought that was a very interesting way of looking at it. He also speculated whether it is Putin or Russia that should be held accountable. He also spoke about the reconstruction effort and the funding thereof. I remind him that we are proudly hosting the Ukraine recovery conference in July next year. Given his long-standing interest in Ukraine, I know that he will take a good deal of interest in that event.
The hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) spoke movingly about accountability and war crimes. Again, I reiterate that I have visited the ICC and our determination and expectation that those who have prosecuted war crimes will be held to account. He set the conflict in a useful global context, which I thought was very interesting, and referred to resource terrorism, which is exactly what the constraints on the flow of grain from the Black sea amount to. He spoke about the existential nature of the Ukrainians’ noble struggle, and I was very interested to learn about the activities and operations of the Pride brigade, which is most welcome. I thank him, as ever, for his and his party’s ongoing support for the Government’s position on Ukraine.
My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) spoke with characteristic knowledge and insight about the two-pronged approach of the Russian war machine and Surovikin—the use of the Dnipro defensive position on the river, and the abhorrent and entirely outrageous attempts to smash civilian infrastructure, including hospitals. He drew a morbid parallel with Syria, which was interesting, but of course it is deeply worrying. He also raised the terrifying spectre of the use of chemical weapons. I think he is right in his judgment that Putin has bought some time, but is there perhaps some sort of revolutionary endgame—who knows? I thought that my hon. Friend’s speculation and the various scenarios he laid out were interesting and based on a deep knowledge of that country, given his former residence there.
Ukraine Update
Bob Seely Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Mr Wallace
It is possible for us to communicate with the leadership of the Russian Ministry of Defence and the leadership of the Russian Government when we need to, and there is a constant capability to do that. That is not particularly easy across the international community at the moment, because General Gerasimov and Minister Shoigu are clearly engaged in the activity that has led us all to the House today, and they are busy doing that. Communication is possible, and I assure the House that, if it became impossible, I would seek other ways of making sure. I also have close allies and partners who can make calls, if necessary, and we utilise them where needed.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
Given all that is happening in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere in the world, does the Defence Secretary agree it is right that the Prime Minister has brought forward a commitment to reach defence expenditure of 2.5% of GDP by 2026? We cannot wait until 2030 to deal with the great threats we face now.
Mr Wallace
First and foremost, 2030 is the key point, because we have to pass through 2.5% to get to 3%. The reality is that we need to make sure that the rise to 3% is done sustainably. I cannot be given a blob of money in 2029 and be expected to buy a warship in five weeks. There has to be a proper, graduated response. I will make sure the response includes 2.5% en route to 3% of GDP.
It is also important to remind the House that being part of NATO helps us to achieve global mass, or certainly mass within the north Atlantic, and enables us to deploy very large numbers of troops, if necessary. On paper, NATO still far outnumbers Russian forces. Since Russia has significantly degraded nearly all of its land armed forces, the ratio is even more imbalanced in the favour of NATO.
Ukraine
Bob Seely Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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James Heappey
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: the nuclear sabre-rattling—that is what it is—is the act of a desperate man who knows that this is not going his way. We will not be deterred from doing what we have done so successfully for the past nine months.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
My right hon. Friend speaks of sabre-rattling. Clearly, there is a great deal of bluff and threat and Putin is trying to break the alliance between Kyiv and the west. Are the Government saying that it is their belief that this is purely bluff?
James Heappey
My hon. Friend, more than anybody in the House perhaps, will know that the Government’s exact intelligence assessment is not something to be shared in the House. However, as I said in response to the previous intervention, we believe it is sabre-rattling and that it is designed to drive a wedge into the cohesion of the western alliance and to deter us from supporting Ukraine at the exact moment when Ukrainian troops seem to have the upper hand.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for that intervention. The shadow Minister for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), and I were in Kosovo only a few months ago, where we witnessed the effects of the horrible sexual violence that was used as a weapon of war. The determination of the international community then was that it would never be repeated, but it has been in conflicts ever since. We need to make sure that not only is the evidence collected, but the victims are given the support that they will need, in many cases, for the rest of their lives. As we made it clear that killing civilians will not be countenanced, so we make it clear that using rape and sexual assault as a weapon of war will not be countenanced. We will come after those people as well.
Bob Seely
In the Syrian war, the Russians and their Syrian allies targeted hospitals as primary targets. Does the hon. Member agree it is regrettable that at the time we did not say and do more and that the international community did not say and do more to hold responsible those senior army officers who were responsible for the deliberate targeting of hospitals, which is one of the most basic breaches of the Geneva conventions?
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for the hon. Member’s intervention, and I do tend to agree with him. As a country, we need to take stock of the freedom that Putin has been given over many years—not just in Syria or parts of the countries bordering his country, but in Crimea—because the tactics the Russians are using in Ukraine now have been perfected over many years and the space the international community has given him to do that has encouraged the use of many of those tactics. We need to look carefully at how we stand up for such individuals in the future, but we will do that by standing firmly with the people of Ukraine at this time. I will make some progress before I give way again.
It is clear that Vladimir Putin is a bully. His partial mobilisation announcements along with his sham referendums to illegally annex large swathes of Ukraine are shameless. They are a cynical attempt to justify a war that has gone badly wrong for Russia. We should view partial mobilisation as weakness—an attempt to hide the fact that, so far, Russian strategy has failed, weapons have failed, command and control has failed, and none of Russia’s war objectives has been met. Putin’s latest miscalculation will lead to more Russian families losing their sons, more Ukrainians being killed and more suffering. The mobilised forces sent to Ukraine will be on the receiving end of high-end western weaponry, and a determined and morally just Ukrainian military defending every inch of its country. In these circumstances, with the poorly equipped Russian conscripts facing cold weather, it is perhaps not surprising that we are seeing so many reports of desertion and troops being unwilling to fight. That means Putin will, I regret, resort to more and more fear to try to achieve his objectives.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
It was a pleasure to lead the delegation last week. For anyone who is interested, I am organising another to take place later in the year, and it will be lovely to see colleagues on it.
That weekend when we were in Ukraine heralded a new phase in the war. First, while there is still a long way to go, there is now a sense in Ukraine of a pathway to Ukrainian victory and Russian military defeat, probably within the next three to 18 months. Secondly, the partial collapse of Russian forces will compel it to commit reserves that it would have wanted to build up until the spring for the chance of a spring offensive. From now on, Russia’s war will almost certainly become a defensive war of digging in and holding on.
It is clear that Russia’s weakness is on the battlefield, while Ukraine’s is economic and political. It has an almost total economic dependency on the west, and it has a dependency on our arms supply. It is clear that Putin will try to break this alliance and gain a political victory where he cannot seize a military one. In military terms, the umbilical cord between us and Kyiv becomes the centre of gravity for the Russians to attack. This explains, in part, Putin’s decision to threaten the use of nuclear weapons and to annex territory to Russia, and his decision on the mobilisation.
Is nuclear weapon use likely? Not by any means, but I think we should speak with a sense of care and proportion. In the minute I have left, I will try to explain a slight difference with the Government. To minimise the chances of nuclear use, tactical or strategic, we have to assume that that threat is real and that at some point, probably as Russian troops face collapse in the south, Putin will have—again, this is a military term—a decision point to either use tactical weapons or not. We have to assume that he may well use them, and the purpose of making that assumption is so that we can plan. To say that he is bluffing means that we do not have a plan, and we will again, as we have been doing since 2007, be playing catch-up in a disastrous situation, with a fascistic Russian state.
Hope is not a strategy. Keeping fingers crossed is not a policy. At every point, Putin has chosen to escalate and increase risk. There is no sign that he will do anything different now. In short, we need to maximise the chance of avoiding tactical use that will kill thousands by planning for it now. I have run out of time, but I will in due course write further on this and what the Ukrainians told us.
Ukraine
Bob Seely Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
In the relatively short time that I have, I will make a few general points. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), and I agreed with much of what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox). This cold war started in 2007 with Putin’s Munich speech. It was a great shame that the political classes both in this country and elsewhere in the European Union did not take that to heart; we have been paying an increasingly high price ever since.
I want to talk about the potential speed of the Russian collapse and what that may mean, and about the nuclear threat, but first I will mention some issues involving kit. A few weeks ago I was in Odesa, talking to the regional governor and members of the county council. They had been trying to buy medical kit from this country—they were not looking for freebies—but they found the export licences very difficult to obtain, although this was medical kit. They were also trying to purchase body armour. I wrote a letter to the Secretaries of State for Defence and for International Trade, and perhaps I could ask one of the two Ministers who are sitting on the Front Bench to follow up on that letter. I would like an answer, simply because I was asked very directly about kit.
Let me raise the more general issue of the southern front, which I think will be a very significant inflection point, and a decision point for both the Ukrainians and the Russians. Everyone is saying that this will be a long war. I am not quite sure that I buy that, because I have always distrusted conventional wisdom. I lived in the Soviet Union back in 1991, and the conventional wisdom was that the Soviet Union would not collapse. That went well. The conventional wisdom was that the nationalities issue was not a problem in the Soviet Union, when it was actually one of the critical factors. Now the conventional wisdom is that this will be a long war. I am not saying that that is necessarily wrong, but the Russians got this war wrong. Even our Ukrainian friends got it wrong. They were saying to us, “Look at doctrine. Russia does not have the kit or the personnel. It is not going to do anything until August this year.” Well, our Ukrainian friends were wrong, and the Germans and the French were wrong in saying that the Russians were not going to invade. We got it right, but then we did not expect the Ukrainians to survive. The battle of Kyiv was won, when we expected it to be lost. The battle of Kharkiv is now probably coming to an end as the Russians pull back and can shell increasingly from a distance. I was talking to a Ukrainian MP from Odesa just two days ago, and the Russians are digging in around Kherson to defend their territory.
The Russians are now making some gains on the eastern front, but I question how long that will go on. There is a considerable chance, given the amount of kit that is coming into Kyiv and being spread throughout the country, that an eastern front will stabilise. The question then is: how likely does a Ukrainian counter-attack become? Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian intelligence, said that Ukraine was going to be ready for a counter-offensive in August. The critical question for me at this point is whether that counter-attack will simply be in the east of the country or whether it will be on the southern front. When I was talking to the commander of the southern front near Mykolaiv about two weeks ago, he told me that they did not even have armoured personnel carriers in which to put their commanders for units to attack on the southern front. It is clear that if the Ukrainians can open up a second front to the south, challenge the Russian positions around Kherson and push through to break that land corridor, there would be a real danger to Russia of a wider collapse, and a growing ineffectiveness of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine.
The Russians are continuing to push forward and threatening Severodonetsk, but I think there is potential, come September, for a significant Russian fall-back and significant Russian damage. When we talk about Russian conscripts coming into the war, we have to remember that it takes at least six months for conscripts to be made ready and trained on kit. We have already seen how badly treated and undermotivated they are. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are training increasing numbers of their own people to go forward, and they now have the kit as well. It is absolutely true, as some of us in this country think, that the Ukrainians have not yet quite mastered combined arms, when it comes to the broader kit that the Government are supplying.
The Government are doing a great job, and the Secretary of State for Defence is doing a wonderful job of effectively being the external quartermaster for the Ukrainian army. I congratulate him wholeheartedly on his role in trying to find NASAMS—national advanced surface-to-air missile systems—air defence kit, planes and tanks. What the Ukrainians say they desperately need now are MLRS—multiple launch rocket systems. These are guided artillery systems that can strike at 30 or 40 kilometres. The significant problem up to now is that the Ukrainians have had only Soviet-era artillery, in the form of the 152, which has a range of approximately 25 kilometres. Now they have the 155, they are able to mildly overmatch the traditional artillery of the Russians, because the 155 has, all things considered, about 5 kilometres of further range. So the Russians are either pushing back or having to go deeper, in which case they expose themselves further. If we can supply MLRS, that will make our position considerably stronger.
Having said that, there is clearly a danger. I take seriously what the Russians say about a nuclear threat. Some of it is undoubtedly bluff. In 2016, the Russians threatened Denmark with a nuclear response if it took part in the American nuclear missile shield. That was bluff. The threats to Finland and Sweden are almost certainly bluff. But, to my mind, there will be six decision points within the next six months where Putin will go over and have to consider whether to use nuclear weapons. There is absolutely no guarantee that he would, but if Crimea were threatened, I think we would start to live in extremely dangerous circumstances.
Those six points are: the collapse and withdrawal of Russian positions around Kharkiv; the collapse of the Russian advance in Donbas, which has not yet happened but may do within the next two or three months; the eventual collapse of new Russian positions this summer; the collapse of Russian positions in Kherson, where they are currently digging in; the entry of Ukrainian forces into the separatist Donbas republics if the Russians start to lose the territory they seized in 2014; and the potential entry of Ukrainian forces into Crimea.
Will Putin use tactical nuclear weapons because of the collapse on the Kharkiv front? No, because it has not happened. Would he be tempted to use nuclear weapons if he were losing Crimea? I am not sure I would want to take that risk, and I cannot answer that question, but I think there is a significant likelihood. The bigger question is: what happens when the Russian land corridor collapses come September and October?
There is a fine line between a Russian victory, which clearly nobody wants, and a Russian collapse, which may become a decision point for a series of catastrophic moves by Putin, the beginning of a significant weakening of the Russian position and its loss of dominance in the Sea of Azov. Looking at the map, the Sea of Azov is on the right-hand side of what was called Novorossiya, the Russian-speaking territories that are fighting just as hard as the rest of Ukraine. That is the point where, for an optimal outcome of this war, they start to negotiate because Putin will try to keep some of the land he has gained. As everyone has said, that is a decision for the Ukrainians and we in this country should not be armchair generals.
When I spoke to some American diplomats a few days ago, I was relieved to hear that they are thinking through and wargaming these very dangerous scenarios. I very much hope the MOD and the Foreign Office are, too. NATO, as far as I can see, does not wargame this because it does not have nuclear weapons, but we and the Americans do, and I hope we are wargaming these scenarios.
I am worried not only because of the big decision-making points but because, first, the use of nuclear weapons is justified in Russian military doctrine where there is an existential threat to the state. Nobody in their right mind thinks Russia is existentially threatened. However, the Russian narrative and the Russian media portray this war as an existential threat to Russia and a defensive war because Russia is trying to seize its territory from NATO. Whether we like it or not, it is being presented as an existential threat.
Secondly, there is a debate about whether the Russians will escalate to de-escalate. They might use a nuclear weapon to try to de-escalate. That is not Russian doctrine—I certainly have not seen it in the Russian doctrine I have read—although there is writing to say that this is some of the thinking.
Thirdly, it is absolutely true to say that the Russians take a very different approach from the rest of the world to nuclear weapons and nuclear war. The Soviets always saw nuclear war as fightable and winnable, which is why they built bomb shelters in so many cities. They do not necessarily have our mindset, which worries me because I think we look at them through our own mindset. We do not understand them on their own terms.
Finally, it is sometimes overlooked but highly dangerous that human beings and nations get trapped by their own narratives. Those of us who have listened to and watched Russian TV over the last five or 10 years know there is a normalisation of the idea of war, including nuclear war, with the west. That is why Russian polling since 2018 shows that something like 50% of Russians polled believe that war with the west is inevitable, and a large number of them believe that nuclear war with the west is inevitable. We are dealing with a different mindset and with people who have been propagandised for 20 years. That is also a danger with China, but it is certainly a danger with Russia.
Do we think that, by our logic, nuclear war is likely? No, because nobody thinks there is an existential threat to Russia—the war is an existential threat to Ukraine but not to Russia. However, in the narrative of the paranoid, conspiracy-driven mindset of the Russian media, which is reflected in the Russian leadership, there is a sense of an external, existential threat, if only to the incredibly amoral, incredibly foolish, Sovietised, sort-of bastardised Slavophiles who are currently running Russia and who see paranoid conspiracy theories in every pothole in Moscow. I say that as a word of warning, because we are dealing with people who think very differently from ourselves.
I respect my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe and North America and my hon. Friend the Minister for Defence Procurement. They have been absolutely superb. We need to see a Russian defeat. At the same time, we need to remember that this is not Berlin in 1945. Limited wars end in negotiation and, whether we like it or not, there will be some kind of negotiation at the end of this war, otherwise it simply will not end. We should remember that.
I agree with what has been said about the integrated review, on which we need a rethink. The integrated review was a good document, but it did not look enough at deep strategy. It brought together all the policies around a theme, but it could have been better. We now need to look at it again. I agree with what many people, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) and the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), have said about not cutting back on defence spending. Cutting back on defence spending would not make any sense and would not be logical, because we will need that defence spending to confront the Chinese threat or the Russian threat.
I wish to make an additional and important point that has not yet been raised, which relates to the national security strategy. Our national security structures are not fit for purpose, and I personally do not think the National Security Adviser is up to the job. I listened to him in Bahrain a couple of months before the war started and he basically said, “Look, climate change is the biggest threat to humanity.” This was in a city that had Iranian weapons pointed at it, in the week when the Chinese were wargaming over Taiwan and in the month when the Russians were building up over in Ukraine. My somewhat flippant response is, “Try doing climate change in the nuclear winter.” The avoidance of state-on-state warfare is still the short-term and medium-term primary aim for this state. Yes, global poverty is incredibly important, as is getting the grain out, however we manage to do so, and I am not dismissing climate change for one second, as it is incredibly important, but it is difficult to tackle climate change and to reach out to states such as Russia and China if we are at war, close to war or in confrontation with them.
I wish to make a final point about ceasefires, because it is important. There is a slight shattering in the western response currently, and we see a slight foot-dragging from not only the Germans and French—this may be surprising —but, potentially, from the US Administration. I well recall, as I was there at the time, that in Georgia the Russians used ceasefires very effectively to solidify their control of the territory they had taken. Again, this summer we are probably going to see a concerted attempt—this is already happening because the Russians are hinting at it—to get the French and the Germans and others to press the Ukrainians for a ceasefire now. Everyone will say, “Stop the war”, because, obviously, there is an overpowering moral and humanitarian argument there, but the reason the Russians would do this is to solidify their control over the ground they have taken. If the Ukrainians are wobbling on this, we need to say to them, “Clearly, you must do what is right, but we must remind you that the Russians have a very aggressive negotiating strategy, that they negotiate ceasefires, as they did in Georgia, often in bad faith and that one of their war aims will be to grasp, solidify and Russify—handing out passports, as we see happening today—those areas that they have taken.” Indeed, the Estonian Prime Minister has said that it is important that we do not get a bad peace. A ceasefire this summer, as attractive as it sounds, would, without further Ukrainian gains, result in a bad peace, further warfare and further bloodshed in the future.
Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
I compliment the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) on her moving contribution. After church last Sunday, while having tea and coffee, I met three young Ukrainian refugees. They were three females, probably in their middle teens. One could speak a tiny bit of English and the other two could not, but even talking with them in a limited way did not half bring home to me why we support Ukraine in the way we do. These young people were frightened, but they were brave and had come to Scotland. I am sure they share some of the sentiments that the hon. Lady just read out to the House.
The hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) has clearly researched this subject very fully and I was most interested in his contribution, which provoked in me a memory of when I went with other Members to visit the 3rd Yorks in Estonia before the covid pandemic. I remember asking the commanding officer—I do not think I am betraying any armed forces secrets here—“You have a huge Russian army group bang opposite you. What happens if the balloon goes up?” What he said to me was very interesting: “Well, there are several factors. The morale is not good among the soldiers opposite us. They see themselves as poorly paid. They are conscripts. And there is a slight problem with alcohol.” He also said that they were not the top-quality troops that we might expect. Have events in Ukraine not proved just how prophetic his words were?
I associate myself with other speakers and say that my party stands four-square with the Government in our efforts to support the people of Ukraine and to recognise their extraordinary courage and valour in taking on an army, which, harking back to what I was told in Estonia, some of us thought was invincible. That is not the case and that is why the thoughts of the hon. Member for Isle of Wight are useful.
Twice before in this place, I have raised the issue of the murderous legacy of the mines left behind in the north of Ukraine—and now, possibly, in the north and east of Ukraine—as Russian forces have retreated. My plea was then, as it is today, that we offer the maximum help we can in knowhow, kit and expertise to get rid of that murderous legacy. Alas and alack, a number of Ukrainians have been killed in their own brave efforts to get rid of this menace. I seek an assurance from the Minister—if not today then at some suitable point—that we are putting our shoulders to the wheel on this, because it is one way in which we can really help.
The horrifying images of Russian tanks exploding that we have seen online and on television show what is called “the jack-in-the box effect”. It happens, so we read, because of the method and manner in which ammunition is stored in the tank, which is why they explode in the fearful way that they do. My first thought is that we should check our own armour and how we hold our ammunition to make sure that there is no danger that we could fall into the same trap.
Arising from that is a reflection on the manner in which the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black sea, was sunk. We have all read varying accounts of American reconnaissance aircraft possibly being involved and what exact missiles were fired or not fired. If we think about two of our most precious military assets, namely our two aircraft carriers, we should look very carefully indeed at what happened to the Moskva. How exactly was it sunk, and are we sure that our defences for these priceless pieces of military hardware are absolutely up to scratch?
Let me give an example. Five years ago, in the summer of 2017, HMS Queen Elizabeth called in on Invergordon in my constituency, and some person light-heartedly, but irresponsibly, flew a drone and landed it on its deck. I asked the then Defence Secretary whether we could be sure that we were completely equipped to deal with that sort of thing. Had that drone, run by some person having a bit of fun, been flown deliberately into the radar assembly, they could have disabled HMS Queen Elizabeth.
We have seen, harking back to Ukraine, the use of drones, not least in taking out Russian armour. Again, I say to Her Majesty’s Government that we need to look very closely at all the aspects of warfare and at what has happened to the Russians.
Bob Seely
I am listening intently to what the hon. Gentleman is saying about the how the Moskva was struck. Is he questioning whether the Neptune missiles destroyed it? Completely by coincidence, I was on the southern front in the air raid shelter the night the Moskva was sunk, and while I was waiting to go back on to the street in Odesa, a general showed me the pictures of the Moskva being sunk and explained it quite carefully.
The intelligence came from Turkish Bayraktar drones and it was two ground-based Neptune missiles that were used. The drones acted as a decoy. The Russians had been very sloppy in their drills—they were just sailing round in the same old pattern and not changing it. They were over-focused on the drones monitoring them, and that allowed the two Neptune missiles in. The Ukrainians themselves are absolutely adamant, and that evening they showed me the pictures of the strike on the ship. I hope that provides some useful clarity, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right in what he is saying: big items can be destroyed very quickly, as we have seen with both tanks and aircraft.
Jamie Stone
There we have it again—an example of the hon. Gentleman’s knowledge of and great interest in this subject, and I thank him for his intervention. It underlines and reinforces the point that we must look at all potential threats to our precious surface fleet, including the two aircraft carriers which will transform the United Kingdom’s defence capability.
I could stray into arguments about whether we should concentrate on the north Atlantic and the home waters nearby, and ask what we are doing in the far east, but that is not for today. However, no debate of this nature, when we are looking at ourselves, would be complete without my echoing the points about the cuts in the size of the British Army. At the start of the war in Ukraine, we saw extraordinary images of a Russian convoy of armoured vehicles and other vehicles essentially using a road or motorway. Having once upon a time served as a private soldier in the Territorial Army, I fell to wondering where on Earth was the infantry integration with armour? Why did the Russians not have, or appear to have, flanking troops in the woods on either side of the column? When we come to study what happened, we have to examine the Russian tactics and ask what has happened to the army that defeated Hitler, which now seems to be verging on incompetent? Maybe I am wrong—who knows?
Like other speakers, I thank the Defence Ministers. It was a generous move by the Secretary of State for Defence to invite a number of us to a gathering at Belvoir Castle to meet the Foreign or Defence Ministers of the Joint Expeditionary Force countries. I attended with the shadow Secretary of State and the Scottish National party defence spokesperson. Ever since then, that same spirit has prevailed; it is a co-operative spirit, and I give credit where it is due. It sends a good message to our own armed forces that we are prepared to work together on these matters.
I remember well the talk at Belvoir Castle about Finland and Sweden possibly joining NATO. Sweden was represented at the gathering; I cannot remember whether Finland was. One could see what was developing to get us where we are today, with the application to join NATO. I strongly hope that they do join NATO. Having been to Norway—again through the armed forces parliamentary scheme—and seen part of the dreaded Bardufoss training that the Royal Marines do, I have seen with my own eyes just how committed the Norwegian armed forces are. They were very welcoming and work extremely well with us, so I think we have a great deal to gain if Sweden and Finland join NATO.