Relationship with Russia and China

Debate between Bob Seely and Edward Leigh

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bob Seely]

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

[Sir Edward Leigh]

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

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

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

Covid-19: Forecasting and Modelling

Debate between Bob Seely and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Bob Seely]

rose—

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. Bob, will you calm down, please? Will everybody calm down?

[Bob Seely]

I do not appreciate being called “far right”.

Russia’s Grand Strategy

Debate between Bob Seely and Edward Leigh

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

We have spent a lot of time on Russia, and we have heard from a lot of people who claim to understand the Russian mentality, but I am not sure it has been mentioned that in the Orthodox calendar, tomorrow is Christmas day. I shall be joining my Russian Orthodox wife at the service this evening and tomorrow morning, and I wish you a very happy Christmas, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I make no apologies for President Putin. Although I am a former chairman of our all-party group on Russia, I certainly gave it up in the light of what happened at Salisbury and before. No doubt he is running a corrupt regime, although I did go with a Council of Europe delegation to look at a previous election that President Putin won, and there was no doubt that there were a lot of people voting for him because people felt that he had restored the pride and the greatness of Russia after the terrible, infinitely corrupt and useless years of Yeltsin, when we took Russia for granted.

I make no apology for President Putin and I do not defend him in any way, but I think the mistake of this debate is to assume, if there was any other conceivable leader of Russia, that their strategy would be very different. Many Russians felt deeply humiliated at the loss of territory that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union, and we constantly hear about the invasion of Crimea and the Donbass region. We hear very little in this Chamber about the fact that Crimea was of course part of Russia for 200 years. It was signed away by the pen of Khrushchev, without the Crimean people being consulted at all, in the 1950s. There is no doubt at all that Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian and wants to be overwhelmingly Russian, and we have to respect its self-determination, and the same applies to many areas of eastern Ukraine.

[Bob Seely]

I am not going to disagree entirely, because I think my right hon. Friend has a useful alternative voice, but what he is saying about eastern Ukraine is not really true, because ethnic Russians are not in the majority. I think he is getting confused between Russian speakers and ethnic Russians—even in Crimea. He talks about the Russian people in Crimea, but Crimea was historically Crimean Tatar, which was the indigenous population. There has been an awful lot of infill of Soviet military pensioners, but that is different from the indigenous people.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I know that entirely, but when people go on about the fact that Crimea was originally Tatar—no doubt America was originally populated by Red Indians, but we do not say that America does not belong to Americans—the fact is that we have to deal with the situation on the ground. All I am saying is that there is an overwhelming feeling among Russian people of a deep sense of humiliation during the Yeltsin years, and as in all countries, they yearn for strong government and leadership.

Levelling-up Agenda

Debate between Bob Seely and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Bob Seely]

I thank everyone for taking part in the debate. I thank the Minister for his eloquent and detailed responses, and I thank you, Sir Edward, and my right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), for your chairmanship.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Thank you for a very good debate on the levelling-up fund—I wish that Gainsborough could get some levelling-up fund too, but that is not for me to say.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the levelling up agenda.

National Security and Russia

Debate between Bob Seely and Edward Leigh

Monday 26th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Since marrying my half-Russian wife 34 years ago in the Russian orthodox cathedral in Gunnersbury, I have made it my business to try to understand Russian culture and Russian people. They certainly respect strength and people standing up to them.

It is a bit of a mystery why this murder was carried out in the way that it was. I think that it was carried out as it was to make it obvious that Russia had carried it out. There has been speculation that it was designed around the Russian election; I think that it was designed to make it absolutely clear that traitors will not be tolerated.

Let me talk a bit about the Russian mindset. When we think of people like Philby and Maclean, we look at them with amused contempt. The Russian views traitors with absolute hatred, because they have betrayed the motherland. I pay tribute to the Russian people, Russian culture and Russian literature. In Russia, there is a deep sense of victimhood, which arises from the second world war and its losses in that war. Our losses pale into insignificance compared with the losses suffered by the Russian people. That sense of victimhood is still there.

When I was last a delegate to the Council of Europe, I attended the previous Russian elections. There was no doubt that those elections were deeply flawed—Russian elections are deeply flawed—but also no doubt about the popularity of Mr Putin. Had he allowed a fair election, he almost certainly would have been elected, because the ordinary Russian felt that he was restoring some sort of pride to Russia.

There is a deep sense of despair and victimhood about how we treated Russia during the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I do not for a moment condone, defend or accept the annexation of Crimea, but the ordinary Russian remembers that there was an independence referendum in 1992 in which Ukraine voted more than 90% for independence and that there was an independence referendum in Crimea in which more than 90% voted for independence from Ukraine. In their view, Ukraine has always been part of Russia and is largely Russian, although they overlook the suffering of the Tatar people. All those facts are very strong in the Russian psyche, as is the attempt to detach Ukraine—which means borderland in Russian—from mother Russia.

[Mr Seely]

My hon. Friend makes a series of important points and I am glad that he is making them. There are counter-arguments to them that I shall not go over now, but does he believe that one problem is that the Russians simply cannot imagine an independent Ukrainian identity that is separate from Russia? That is one of the driving factors behind the issue.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

No, they cannot imagine that because Kiev is the source of the Rus’ people and the thousand-year-old history of the Russian Orthodox Church, to which Kiev is as much an integral part as Canterbury is to the Anglican communion. They cannot understand Ukraine as an independent entity.

None of this is to condone or in any way defend Russia. What are we going to do about this situation? First, as I said to the Prime Minister, we need to create a coalition of peace through security. Russia would not have been too concerned about the expulsion of 23 diplomats —that is tit for tat—but it would have been very concerned about the fact that the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister have made alliances throughout Europe, that we have been listened to and that these expulsions have been going on today. Russia will be extremely concerned about that.

Secondly, we should not seek to copy Russia’s methods or attack it in the way that it attacks. We should be careful. I know that some Members want to close down RT. I do not defend RT in any shape or form, but we should leave it to Ofcom. We should leave it to due process, not political interference from this place. We should also be careful about what we do in respect of the City of London. It has a reputation throughout the world for fair dealing. We act on evidence. If there is evidence of criminality and dirty money, we must act on it, but we cannot attack Russians who invest in our country and in the City of London simply because they are Russian. That would be a mistake.

What do we do? We make alliances, which we have done, and we expel the diplomats. The point I have been making again and again, with the Chair of the Defence Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), who went way back and quoted Palmerston, is that Russians historically respect strength. We currently have just 800 men in the Baltic states. We have 150 in Poland. It is simply not enough. Surely, history proves to us that in dealing with Russia, words are not enough. Russians want to see action on the ground.

Why did we defeat the USSR in the cold war? It was not with words, but with solid determination to spend what needed to be spent on defence. We have heard the former Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon), and we know the stresses on the defence budget. The Foreign Secretary should echo the words of the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who said in the estimates debate not three weeks ago that spending 2% on defence was not enough. We should make a solid and real commitment to the Baltic states. That is what will concern Mr Putin: the determination to put troops on the ground. I know about all the pressures on the Government that are arising from health and many other things, but unless we are prepared to make that commitment—to do what Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan were prepared to do to bring down the Soviet Union—we will never counter the Russian threat.

Russia is not a natural enemy of our country. It is sometimes difficult to say that in this Chamber. We have had speech after speech condemning Russia. We are two powers at either end of Europe. From the days of Queen Elizabeth I, we have traded together. Russia is not and should not be an existential threat to this country. There has been a lot of talk about cyber-warfare. I have no doubt that Russia is attempting and engaging in cyber-warfare, but I do not believe that it could seriously affect our democracy. We should be proud of our democracy and determined that it is resilient. We must not indulge in Russophobia. We must be proportionate and determined, and we must be prepared to spend on defence what we need to spend.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Of course, I would not want for a moment to disagree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He knows what is going on and I echo what he says: the Russians are indulging in some attempt to destabilise our values. I make no defence of what they are doing; I just think that we are a sufficiently robust economy and democracy that we can weather it and that they will not change things fundamentally in our country. We should be aware of it, but we should have confidence in our self-reliance.

It is terribly important that we are serious about this subject. There is absolutely no point in our having this debate and attacking President Putin, only for all our attacks to completely wash off the Russian people, who do not want to be an extension of western Europe in their values, economy or anything else. What will have an effect on them? Is it words in this Chamber, or actions on the ground? Are actions on the ground enough? There may be no absolute real and present danger to our country, but there is to the Baltic states, not least because of their very sizable Russian minority.

[Mr Seely]

rose—

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I must finish now.

There is a very sizable minority of people in those states who are not that well treated. Many Russians believe fervently in their soul that those minorities are not well treated and that President Putin has the right to interfere. We have NATO. The Baltic states are not Ukraine. We must not allow what happened in 1940 to happen to the Baltic states. Therefore, words are not enough. We must will the means. We must spend more on defence and put the troops into the Baltic states.