Russia’s Grand Strategy

Matt Western Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I totally agree. I think a negotiated settlement is a form of appeasement because I just do not believe that it will work in the long run. I genuinely believe that if we say, “OK, however it may be; we will look over that section of it”, it will just give him time to regroup and rearm and decide what he is going to do next.

The war that is now taking place represents a huge threat to the European nations because, some would say, of the ambitions and ideology of article 42—PESCO— “What is wrong with that?” It says that you would procure as a whole; that there would not be replication of procurement, with countries buying the same equipment rather than focusing on where it will go.

When I talk to our American allies at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, they certainly think developing the European defence fund is a good thing that will up spending to 2%. As we are seeing now, one of the biggest risks to NATO in its history as a military alliance is that a country such as Germany—the only country that has the equipment, or that can manufacture the equipment, needed for an operation—is able to say, “Sorry, no,” or, “We are not going to do it.”

Article 42 exists and PESCO has been established, so NATO needs to work out its protocols before these issues become prevalent in a procurement generation or two—in 20 or 30 years’ time. It has to be addressed now because, fundamentally, it is Russia and Putin’s strategy to probe the strength of western military capability.

I am very worried about Germany’s attitude of waiting to see what the US does, because it is not President Biden’s core instinct to make such decisions. When he was Vice-President, he and Obama had a big falling out over the surge in Iraq. And when he was a Senator, he wanted less American intervention. Intervention is not his natural instinct. I praise the Americans for the amount of money President Biden is signing off, but a situation is developing in which other European countries are hiding behind a delaying tactic, and that delay is a problem because Putin needs time to rebuild and restrengthen.

As the hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) rightly said, the rebuilding cost is getting bigger and bigger, probably exponentially. I have cited some of the statistics, and the cost directly reflects on our citizens. He said taxpayers have already paid about £3.2 billion, but the cost is much greater in the price inflation we have seen for energy, fertilisers, food and crops. We all know the reasons, and it will not be resolved while this continues.

Upping military capability and spending in this country, and in Europe, is vital because it will improve our taxpayers’ long-term cost of living. Drawing on my experience as a procurement Minister, industry needs a far longer commitment to armament manufacturing than the sporadic increases and decreases we have seen. Industry cannot make the commitment needed to manufacture armour, weaponry and other capital equipment on a continuing basis if it is not sure how long the contract will last. That is straightforward business sense, and it is why we have to make a long-term funding commitment, and we need to encourage Europe to do so, too.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I agree with everything the right hon. Gentleman is saying. Unfortunately I missed last year’s debate, but this is an honest, simple question. Back in 2017-18, when I was new to this place, were we having debates about the request from Ukraine to help it arm itself? I do not know that we were. If we were not, why not?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

We were having those debates, not least in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. There was a Rose-Roth seminar of the Parliamentary Assembly in Kyiv in June 2016. The Ukrainians could not have been clearer to the allies who were there about what the invasion of Crimea meant, and it was brushed aside because there were too many vested interests in the way energy policy was going at the time and, quite frankly, because there was disbelief that anything like this would happen.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I will take your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker, because most of it has already been said—although that has never stopped us from repeating it in this place.

It is a real privilege to speak in this debate and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on obtaining it. I always feel slightly worried when the word “grand” is used of anything, because if we are not careful it covers a whole lot of more tactical aspects that we forget about. However, he is right that this is a debate about the grand strategy of what was once the Soviet Union, has since been broken up, and is now Russia.

To begin with, I want to dwell on a remarkable charity named Siobhan’s Trust that my hon. Friend—I call her my hon. Friend—the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) and I visited and worked with. Interestingly, although we are not supposed to say this, the man who set up and runs the charity, David Fox-Pitt, is sitting in the Gallery right now. He is the epitome of what is very best about this United Kingdom. When all the refugees were pouring across the border and lost in the middle of Ukraine, having been struck, the team upped sticks from where they were in Scotland, with their trucks, and headed straight for the border to try to provide food and sustenance to those people.

Siobhan’s Trust got there weeks ahead of Oxfam and all the rest, and crossed the border because the team realised there were more refugees in Ukraine than were coming out. They raised the money themselves, got support from companies such as Dr. Oetker from Germany and Italian pizza companies, and got trucks with pizza ovens on. They now go to places as close as maybe a mile or so from the Russian border—in fact, quite recently they went into Kherson, just after it was liberated, and fed people there. That was where they came under shellfire, and I suspect that was because the Russians knew they were there and what they were doing.

As my hon. Friend said, the charity feeds 4,000 people who are dispossessed, living in freezing conditions, often with no heating or hot water, sometimes with no water at all and certainly with no electricity. The one high spot of their day will be the arrival of the trucks from Siobhan’s Trust, led by wonderfully eccentric British people dressed in Ukrainian kilts. The Ukrainians did not know they had a kilt until Siobhan’s Trust arrived in Ukraine, but now they have a national kilt, and I hope it will become something that is worn on the fashion catwalks of Europe to celebrate—[Interruption.] I know I am not a fashion icon, but nevertheless I would be prepared to wear it.

The beauty of this is all the work the charity does. We sometimes forget about this when we get into the grand strategy, but when we were over there, as my hon. Friend said, we realised what it really means when we talk about grand strategy. It means seeing the destroyed buildings, blocks of flats that had people living in them when the rockets hit; it means being with the soldiers when they have to clear up the dead bodies in villages that have been shelled and rocketed; it means never being able to come off a single-track path because the Russians have strewn anti-personnel mines all over the fields and houses in the hope that people will enter them. That is what it really means. It means that this barbaric, dictatorial, fascist crook called Putin has wrought devastation and damage on ordinary people whose lives were pretty poor in the first instance.

One of the Ukrainian guides said to us, “The thing you don’t understand is that we don’t have and have never had the kind of support and money that you have. When you look at our villages that are devastated, you see pretty low-standard villages, but what has happened is that the Russians have moved all the troops they have from the east of Russia, where the living standards are even lower by a long way. For them, this is Manhattan. They rob every single house and everything that’s in it, and that which they can’t rob, they rape. They use rape as a tool of war and a tool of suppression. That is why we evacuated so many of our women and children from these villages—because we knew what was going to happen to them if and when the Russians came.”

As the hon. Member for Bradford South said, we went on to visit the military hospital in Kharkiv, which was very sobering. The hospital gets rocketed at least two or three times a week. When it gets hit, the people who work there carry on, despite the explosions around them, with what they are doing. Interestingly, they said to me, “Please can you go back and tell your Government that we need armoured ambulances desperately, because we cannot get the wounded to the hospitals quickly enough? We need that more than almost anything else.” Secondly, they said, “We desperately need help in terms of paramedics, to stabilise people before they get into the ambulances. You cannot understand the difference it makes to whether or not we save their lives. We just don’t have enough. If only Britain could lead the west in providing people who can educate and train paramedics for us urgently, that would save more lives.”

Thirdly, they said, “The problem now is that so many of our soldiers are committing suicide because they cannot cope with the total devastation and the mental breakdown that comes from combat stress. The UK and America are the two countries that probably know the most about this, because of Afghanistan and Iraq. We desperately need some help from the UK to educate and train our mental health specialists in how to deal with this. It’s a huge problem.” It is a huge problem in America and here in the UK, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex has helped us get in touch with Combat Stress.

[Matt Western]

Given the right hon. Gentleman’s experience in politics, I am interested to know what he thinks the UK and other countries could provide beyond what he just described in terms of humanitarian and infrastructure support to the people of Ukraine.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

There is a huge amount that can be provided from what are essentially wealthy nations. We are wealthy nations, and when we compare ourselves with where Ukraine is, we are very wealthy. It is just the determination of what we want to do. In Ukraine, they desperately need arms; they need supplies of ammunition and weapons. There is no question about that, but they also need—and this is about humanity—help to survive in all these areas. The brave men and women who are fighting on the front deserve all the support they can get, but the bit that is missing when we debate this issue is the people behind who have been devastated and shelled and have no homes. We need to find a way to help them as well. I beg the Government to talk to their counterparts in Ukraine and find a way to get the rest of western Europe to supply the things that Ukraine requires that do not have a gun on them but will save many, many lives if they are provided.

I completely agree that Russia’s grand strategy is to expand. It has never got over losing the land that it held in the Soviet Union, and it wants it back; it has been absolutely clear about that. Strangely enough, countries in the west—Germany is a good example—have failed to recognise the real threat of becoming addicted to something that is supplied by a country as volatile and ill led as this. I come back to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. How in heaven’s name did the rest of Europe allow that to happen? How in heaven’s name did they allow Germany to bully them into believing it was none of their business? All of us—every country—takes a share of that. It should never have been allowed to be built, and I do not exclude my own country in that regard. It showed a sign to Russia that as addicted as we were, we would never do anything against Russia. That was as important as supplying them with weapons, because Russia then saw us and said, “You know what? They put money first and energy second, and that energy is from us. They will never come and stop us.”

In reality, this is our war—we cannot forget that. It is as much as if we were standing on the frontline with the Ukrainians. We have to be there with them in spirit, and we have to give them the weapons, because they must win this war. The thing that haunts me now more than anything else from that visit is the one phrase they use, which is, “Please don’t forget us.” They say, “We are fighting for our freedom and our lives, and we are worried that you are getting bored of what is going on over here. Please do not forget us.” All I simply say in the House today is that we must not forget them. We must be with them. This is our war; we must win it. Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava.