Ukraine Update

John Healey Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. His presence is welcomed this afternoon by the whole House. We know that it is not entirely his fault, but it is nearly seven weeks since he was last able to give us a statement on the situation in Ukraine. That was the day after President Zelensky addressed this House. The Secretary of State said then, as he did this afternoon, that he would keep the House up to date. May I say, on behalf of the public, that we would welcome more regular statements as the Russian war on Ukraine continues?

Like the Secretary of State, we salute the bravery of the Ukrainian people, military and civilians alike. That bravery is led by President Zelensky personally, but it is typified by the military last stand of the troops at the Azovstal steel plant and by the people’s resistance in Russian-occupied Kherson. We also renew our total condemnation of this brutal Russian invasion of a sovereign country and our determination to see that all those responsible for the mass graves in Mariupol, for the crimes, rapes and assassinations in Bucha and for the civilian bombings in almost every town and city across Ukraine are pursued to the end for their war crimes.

We welcome the role that the UK is playing and the further UK military assistance to Ukraine that the Secretary of State has outlined today, which has Labour’s full support. He says the UK has provided 5,000 anti-tank missiles and 100 anti-air missiles, but these direct donations are a fraction of the total. Can he tell us the total of such weapons provided so far by western allies? Has the MOD yet signed contracts and started production of replacement next-generation light anti-tank weapons and Starstreak missiles?

This is the first day of the third month of Putin’s invasion, and it is a new phase, as the Defence Secretary said. What is needed now is no longer old, spare weapons from the Soviet era but the new NATO weapons that Ukraine will need for Putin’s next offensive against Odessa or Kyiv. We need to shift from crisis management in response to the current conflict to delivering the medium-term military support that Ukraine will need. What is he doing to ensure this step change in support?

Given that 5 million refugees have now left Ukraine, what is the Secretary of State doing to offer the 700 personnel still held at high readiness in the UK for humanitarian help? Is it still the case that the MOD has offered only 140 armed forces personnel to help sort out the shameful shambles of the Home Office’s visa and refugee systems?

I just got off the tube after visiting NATO’s Allied Maritime Command in Northwood. They took my phone off me, so I did not realise we were having this statement, which is why I am using handwritten notes this afternoon. This is a proud, professional, British-led multinational command, and I pay tribute to it for the work it is doing, day in and day out, to keep us all safe.

NATO has proved to be such a powerful security alliance because it pools multinational military capacity, capability and cash, with an annual budget of more than $1 trillion, to protect 1 billion people, but Ukraine reminds us that the greatest threat to UK security lies in Europe, the north Atlantic and the Arctic, not in the Indo-Pacific. This reinforces NATO as the UK’s primary security obligation, but the Secretary of State gave us only a paragraph on NATO.

Our leadership in NATO could be at risk as Britain falls behind our allies in responding to this invasion of Ukraine. More than a dozen European countries are now rebooting security plans and defence spending, but the UK has not yet done either. I therefore urge the Secretary of State to revisit the integrated review, to review defence spending, to reform military procurement and to rethink his Army cuts. We will be dealing with the consequences of Putin’s war for many years to come, and now is the time for longer-term thinking about how the strategy for European security must change.

[Mr Wallace]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. We spoke last week about the timing of this statement, which I had hoped to make tomorrow, but the United States has called a 40-nation meeting in Germany and I will therefore not be here. I took the opportunity to make this statement when I could. I am sorry if he has cut short his trip, and I would be delighted to arrange with the Navy for him to return to the headquarters, without his phone, for longer in custody.

As I said, I promised to keep the House updated, and I have not only briefed a number of colleagues from this House, from across parties, on a number of occasions, but given Members access to our intelligence officials and senior generals in order that they can get the latest throughout. My hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces has responded to two debates and answered one urgent question—I will not take the credit for the UQ; Governments get asked UQs, but they provide an opportunity. We will continue to update all Members, and I am happy to have another cross-House dial-in for all Members on the subject—it is incredibly important that we do so. Just as it is important that we calibrate our response to Russia, it is important that the Government calibrate their response within the House, so that we make sure that everything is not a surprise to Members and that we consult as we go along.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about NLAWs and Starstreaks. We have an ongoing relationship with the industry, and we will be replacing them or are replacing them. Not surprisingly, there is now a lot of interest in those British-made products, but it is very important that we replenish our stocks. Obviously, we are in that line to do so. The Treasury has agreed to fund the new-for-old replacement of those, but it is very important, given the state of the Russian Government, that we make sure we replenish as soon as we can. There is a daily relationship with our industry; the Minister for Defence Procurement speaks to those in the industry at least once a week, and the Prime Minister will soon convene a meeting with all the leads to make sure that we are doing everything we can, not just for ourselves but for Ukraine and others. Sometimes there is a bit of juggling whereby I release something that we do not yet need, so that another country can have it first or it goes to where the threat is more pressing, or we persuade a friendly country to divert its order so that it can come to us or to Ukraine. We are often involved in that basic defence diplomacy, whereby we know a country is buying something such as an NLAW, it does not need it right now and we see whether we can take it off its hands and it then delays its order. We try to make sure we do that as much as possible.

I am delighted to place in the House the international update on how much has been donated. Obviously, some countries are more open than others about what they have done, so I will place in the Library a table showing those things. It is not for me to let another country’s identity be known if it wishes to keep that secret, but what we can publish, we shall.

I can inform the House that in the past week alone we have supplied 1,000 anti-tank weapons, 14 Wolfhound armoured vehicles and 4,000 night-vision goggles. I can update further that to date we have also supplied 5,361 NLAWs—up from the original 2,000; more than 200 Javelins; and 104 high-velocity and low-velocity anti-air missiles—this will grow to more than 250. Obviously, if we supply any more new weapon types, I will inform the House as we do so.

On NATO, one of the discussions we will have on the sidelines tomorrow is, obviously, the future for NATO. A few weeks ago in Brussels, NATO Defence Ministers tasked NATO to go away and come back with its long-term plans. The right hon. Gentleman is right to say that we are in crisis management and the short-term response, but we need a long-term plan. We need to know what NATO will look like and how western Europe—or Europe, including many of its new members—will contain Putin after all this has passed. We are dealing with a man who has clearly been involved in an illegal invasion of a country and war crimes against the Ukrainian people. We need to know how we are going to live with that neighbour in Europe, should he still remain. That is an important consideration for all of us and it goes to the heart of defence reform and our spending. Of course, as I have always said, as the threat changes, so must our defence posture, which includes funding. As I have said publicly, in the here and now we are getting the spending we need, but he is right to raise the issue of medium-term and long-term funding, which we will definitely be looking at.

The right hon. Gentleman made a point about how we are now “the only country”, but that is because we were the first country; when we had our £24 billion settlement, no one else in NATO had yet gone there. Sweden had gone there but it was not in NATO, and so had Australia. So his comments are slightly punishing Britain for being the first, because we did this way before the invasion of Ukraine and a lot of the increases he is talking about have been afterwards. That is not to say that we should not look at what more we can all do and how that knocks into other areas.