James Sunderland
Main Page: James Sunderland (Conservative - Bracknell)Department Debates - View all James Sunderland's debates with the Ministry of Defence
Ukraine: UK Military Support
James Sunderland Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Leo Docherty
Our armed forces are more mobile, deployable and agile than ever before. That is what will meet the threats that we face, and that is what the integrated review got right. Our support to Ukraine has been very small in terms of mass, but—on the hon. Lady’s question about our armed forces’ readiness, or capacity, to react to future threats globally—she should be reassured that, thanks to the £24 billion uplift in defence spending, we are in good shape. We do not want large bodies of men and women sitting in barracks; we want them deployable, ready, lethal and agile.
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
I want to ask the Minister about policy resilience. We heard from him that the level of support to Ukraine will continue, but for how long will it continue, particularly if the conflict goes from months into years and becomes an attritional campaign? Also, is that view and stance shared by all our other allies?
Leo Docherty
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question; he pays close attention to these matters. We have all been clear that our support to Ukraine will, I expect, last many years. We have had a very close defence relationship since 2014. We are moving to a phase of the campaign that is attritional and will be continued at tragic and significant cost to the Russian state. We cannot speculate about how long that might last, but we must be prepared for it to last for a very long time.
We should be reassured by the fact that we and our allies across western Europe have the resolve to see this through, because apart from kit and equipment, resolve is the key ingredient to a successful military campaign. We have all observed how the Russian armed forces are completely absent in terms of the moral element. I would be reassured by the fact that, throughout NATO and our military and diplomatic alliances in western Europe, that resolve is shared, and we are much stronger because we are part of an amazing alliance. Our position is different from that of Russia because it has very few friends.