Ukraine: Update

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

The hon. Gentleman is right: it is incredibly important that we counter that narrative. He will have heard me say twice from the Dispatch Box what this is not. It is not an attack on Russia; it is not a proxy war; it is not a NATO-orchestrated aggression in any way at all. It is fundamentally about helping Ukraine to defend itself. We make sure that we message that throughout Government, and that we message it as much as possible into Russia, so that Russians understand the consequences of President Putin’s badly thought through special operation. I think that is why we are seeing fractures in the Russian general command and, indeed, among its political leaders, who themselves know that nothing is going to plan.

This is important, and it is important further across the globe. When there are grain shortages in Africa, or people cannot afford it, it is not because of the west; it is because of what Russia has done in the Black sea and what Russia is doing to the ports in Mariupol and other such places. That is why Africans are finding it hard to get grain and are paying more for it—because of Russia.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend describes the Russian armed forces as “poorly led” and “badly equipped”. What assessment does he make of the Wagner Group, which seems to be operating independently and, allegedly, with more successful effect? Am I right in thinking that an organisation that pulls criminals out of jail and sends them into battle is surely operating well outside the law of armed conflict?

[Mr Wallace]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point about Wagner. For a long time, Wagner has operated outside the rules of any law. That has been its selling point in Libya and Mali in Africa: “Pay for us with contracts, diamonds or whatever”—there are no rules. Wagner has been observed on numerous occasions engaged in war crimes and events, but given its proximity to the Kremlin, it does not fool anyone that it is somehow some unilateral, purely commercial operation. Currently, we think that two thirds of the Wagner force around the Bakhmut area are convicts taken from prisons. They are suffering approximately two thirds casualty rates, so it is not a good deal for convicts in the Wagner Group.

It is also a very worrying reflection. If I were General Gerasimov, I would be asking myself why I am outwitted and outperformed by a bunch of mercenaries and, by the looks of things in Moscow, rivals. What does it say about the Russian army that it takes a bunch of mercenaries, as they would see it, to get some traction? However, I would not believe Wagner’s propaganda either. There is not much traction; there is only death, at the hands of Jafar Montazeri their paid commanders or, indeed, their own men. We have seen the social media videos in which the group executed a convict of their own using a sledgehammer.