Countering Russian Aggression and Tackling Illicit Finance

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I thank all the right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to this debate. Many points have been made over the past few hours, but two in particular stand out. First, there was a consensus across all parts of the House—with the exception of one Member who spoke—that the Government have not gone anywhere near far enough with the package of sanctions that was announced yesterday. Secondly, there is an enormous gulf between the rhetoric employed by Ministers and the lack of action that we have seen on illicit finance over many years.

Let me reiterate the Opposition’s position on these issues. We support the Government in taking a firm stand against Russian aggression and in favour of Ukraine’s freedom to decide its future. We support solidarity with our NATO allies. We reject the imperialist notion of “spheres of influence” by which Russia seeks to limit the choices and freedoms of its neighbours.

There can, of course, always be a nationalist appeal to people who speak the same language living across different borders, but if we follow that route, we will be in a never-ending cycle of ethnically based conflicts. No one has pointed out the dangers of that road more eloquently this week than Martin Kimani, the Kenyan ambassador to the UN Security Council, who urged the world to leave behind the mindset of dead empires. His warning not to take refuge in nostalgia and grievance but to look to the future was a leadership lesson for our times. What a contrast between that powerful eloquence and the recent essay on Ukraine by President Putin. Anyone reading that will have seen declarations of love and common history laced with threats and denial of freedom on every single page, and the desperate, needy pleas for respect.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I thank the right hon. Member, my friend, for allowing me to intervene. The real worry is that Putin’s forces have now gone into the area where his proxy forces have operated: Luhansk and Donetsk. Two thirds of those provinces are still in Ukraine, yet the Duma has said that they are now Russian, so at any moment, we can expect Russian troops to go across those demarcation lines. We therefore have to be extremely strong in response and our sanctions have to be much harder.

[Mr McFadden]

I respect the right hon. Member’s experience and agree absolutely with his intervention. Let us call things what they are: not breakaway republics, but step-by-step annexation; not peacekeepers, but an invading force. We have seen the pattern over and over again.

The former High Representative of the European Union, Baroness Ashton, has spoken about President Putin’s strategy of the wedge. He seizes part of the territory of a neighbouring country—Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, or parts of the Donbas in Ukraine. By holding the wedge, he seeks to limit the freedom of those countries to join international associations. He seeks to absorb the rest of the country in managing the conflict that he has created. He uses up resources, he creates a refugee problem and, if he cannot take over neighbouring countries entirely, he at least ensures that they are not free to develop as they wish because they are not whole and their freedom is compromised.

That “Greater Russia” mindset has been behind President Putin’s policy towards Ukraine for the past eight years. Right now, it is not fully clear whether he will be content just to hold the wedge or whether he will go further, but even what he has done so far is already limiting Ukraine’s options and choices for the future.

How should we respond? Some lessons have been learned. The solidarity shown by the United States, the United Kingdom and most European countries in recent weeks has been important and impressive. Calling out the troop build-up and the creation of flashpoint incidents and false flag pretexts has shone a welcome light on what is happening. The development of open source intelligence has exposed the ham-fisted propaganda emerging from Russia and its troll factories.

Allied unity is important, but so too is allied resolve. In the past, we have set red lines, but when they were breached we have drawn back. The result in Syria was the repeated use of chemical weapons and the ability for Russia to dictate the course of events for years afterwards. This time, if we talk about maximum sanctions for military action, we have to be prepared to carry them out. Who really believes that sanctioning just three people who have already been on the US list for years will deter President Putin from acting further? No wonder the Royal United Services Institute, the respected defence and foreign policy think-tank, described yesterday’s actions as like having

“turned up to a gunfight with a peashooter.”

The Government’s actions have to match their rhetoric. Yesterday, that simply was not the case. The Minister’s defence is that this is simply the first tranche and that there is more to come, but what is the case for waiting, given what we have seen? Is there anything in President Putin’s actions in recent days to suggest that he is in compromise mode? He is not. He is testing us every hour.

Not only do we need a sanctions regime that matches the seriousness of what has been done, but we need determined action to clean up what the Intelligence and Security Committee has called the London laundromat.