Russia’s Grand Strategy

John Howell Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

As the leader of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe, I have a major problem: we have to deal with the Russians all the time, almost on a daily basis. The question I have asked, and to which I have not received a proper answer from anyone, is how we should deal with them, and in a way that takes the debate further. We as a delegation have spent our time hassling the Russian members by challenging their credentials and making life very uncomfortable for them, but the question I have above all of that is this: why is Russia so bothered about being a member of the Council of Europe; about being a member of a multilateral organisation that, as we have already heard, it does not really want to be part of? I can think of a number of reasons, but I am not sure they are adequate. I can think of reasons such as giving it the ability to interfere in other countries in a way that it would not otherwise have. If that is the reason, why does it put up with us and others in the Council of Europe making life fundamentally uncomfortable?

From my perspective, it is important that the members of the delegation know something about issues before we go over to meetings of the Council. I arranged two discussion groups, one with a leading service person who is one of our service’s chief Russia experts, and another with a leading dissident. One of the key messages of the leading service person was that we should not continue simply to hassle and harass Russia, which was a wasted opportunity; we should instead use the opportunity to gather intelligence from the Russians on what their real objectives were.

I have tried that on a number of occasions. My life in doing so has been difficult, because some of those people are not the sort with whom one might like to have conversations in the normal course of a general and friendly discourse—some are really ugly characters. Nevertheless, we make an effort to do that, and it is important to try to get to grips with what the Russians are doing and what the thinking behind them is.

One of the other key messages of that service person was not to look at Russia from a western perspective, but to buy an atlas produced in Russia. If we looked at that, we would see that the Russian perspective is very different from the perspective of Russia that we would get from looking at a western atlas. Putting Russia at the centre of those atlases shows, among other things, how important the Arctic is to Russian thinking and to their strategic objectives.

The other person we invited over was a leading dissident, Vladimir Kara-Murza. He has been poisoned twice in Russia. I came across him at the Council of Europe when we were both attacking Belarus on the issue of the forced landing of the Ryanair flight from Athens to Lithuania. I got on well with him and thought it would be a good idea to invite him to speak, as a counter to the clear messages we had from the service chief.

The leading dissident put a lot of stress on the fact that, as has been mentioned in the debate, the support that Putin has in Russia is very thin and that one of the chief motivations for Putin is to justify to his own people how he has managed to change the Russian constitution to allow him to stand for election again. That was not allowed in the past and, apparently, Putin is nervous about that. Vladimir Kara-Murza, being a Muscovite himself, spoke about how, travelling around Russia to have meetings, it was impossible to tell whether he was in Moscow or somewhere else, because the level of dissidence was the same across the whole of Russia. That is an important point to make in analysing what is going on, and why it is so.

We asked Vladimir Kara-Murza why he thought that Putin had supported Belarus. He said, “They are the last two dictators left in Europe, and if one of them goes, it makes the position of the other more dangerous—more critical.” I thought that was interesting, because we might have taken the view that if one of them went, the other would just continue, but so nervous is Putin of being the last dictator in Europe that he chose to support Belarus.

So where does that leave us? It leaves me asking the same question about what we should do. I was interested to hear the comment from my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) that we do not have an overall strategy for dealing with Russia, and certainly, in my experience, that is exactly the position that we are in. It leaves us facing a significant military power, but one, I think, that is slightly weakened by the fact that it still wants to participate in these multilateral organisations. I have a clear idea of what the international order should be and what it should consist of, and I try to make sure that I continue with that objective in the Council of Europe. Does this situation make Russia more or less dangerous? I think that it makes it more dangerous, and from that perspective this debate is very useful.