Ukraine Update

Felicity Buchan Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

There are some that have an appetite; there are not many. Some of the equipment is quite old—a lot of the MiG-29s in the east come from the fall of the Berlin wall, so hon. Members can gauge their age. There are some useful ground attack aircraft in Europe and, as I say, I would defend any one of those nations’ options of deploying them. One of the ways that we could help to support them is by backfilling by supplying our Typhoons to patrol their skies and so on. The hunt is still on. If anyone comes forward, I am happy to support them. Sometimes they have been updated with third countries’ equipment, which gives those countries a veto, and I will work to persuade those third countries to release any holds on them as well.

[Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)]

Russia has clearly suffered serious logistical issues in the first phase of the conflict. What other lessons have we learned from the first phase and to what extent can we use those lessons as we enter what seems to be a new phase?

[Mr Wallace]

The first lesson, “Don’t take Russia at its word; take it on its action”, is the most important lesson for many in the international community. We gave up on that a long time ago, but that is the first thing. There will be a lot of lessons. I would not rush into that, because we also need to learn from the Ukrainians, who are rightly focused on fighting rather than on a feedback loop to us, which will be essential in understanding it.

The big lesson is that we must prove to the world that ripping up international law and being more brutal than an adversary still does not get someone to win. One calculation that President Putin and his generals have is, “We don’t care about human life; we don’t care about international law; and if we just maintain that, somehow, we’ll achieve victory—irrespective of the cost and the human suffering.” The international community has to be totally unified in demonstrating that as folly.