Missile Incident in Poland Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Lord Anderson of Swansea
Main Page: Lord Anderson of Swansea (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Anderson of Swansea's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, we are fully engaged in training personnel; from the annexation of Crimea, we have been working strongly with the Ukrainian authorities and have specific programmes for it. There is currently a live programme training 10,000 personnel and a raft of other programmes and initiatives that we are running directly with the Ukrainian authorities to ensure that they do not just have the best equipment, which we are providing, but are well trained in using it.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
The Minister and my noble friend were right to praise the restraint of the Polish Government—incidentally, they have also responded magnificently to the refugee crisis—but does this incident not reveal vulnerabilities? Poland held back and refused to invoke Article 5 of NATO, yet Russia is waging cyberwarfare at the moment on a number of NATO countries. Is it the Government’s view that cyberwarfare is capable of leading to an invocation of Article 5?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I will not speculate on the triggers of Article 5. The Polish Government followed the protocols very specifically; they reflected on the Article 4 elements of ensuring that consultation took place immediately with NATO members, which was the right approach as facts were being established. The noble Lord rightly raises the threat and challenge posed by cyberwarfare. I do not recall if he was in the House yesterday when we discussed the situation in Georgia—the continued occupation of the breakaway republics and the Russian influence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia—but one of the areas of support we are providing to the Georgian authorities is in exactly that space. The United Kingdom is among the leaders on cyber, in both dealing with cyber threat and cyber defences. I assure him that we are focused on all these fronts in our response to, and support of, not just Ukraine but other countries directly impacted by Russian aggression.