Ukraine — House of Commons, 2022-04-26
Topic: Defense
Robert William Henry Seely (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank everyone on the Island who has been offering to take in Ukrainian refugees and helping out in any way with the aid effort, particularly Victoria Dunford in East Cowes, whose MAD-Aid charity has done wonderful work in Moldova and is now helping thousands of Ukrainian refugees in that part of the world Having served for a chunk of the past 10 years or so in the Army, I agree very strongly with what my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) said about his—justified—concerns about the size of the armed forces. There has been an ongoing debate about whether we go for mass and whether our enemy of the future will be a state or non-state actor, and the simple answer is that an armed force needs to be able to do both. We need resilience, mass and redundancy, and we do not have that. Our armed forces have been stripped back to the bone in part to justify cyber and all these new tools of warfare, but that does not excuse not being able to fight state-on-state conflict, as my hon. Friend says Indeed, as the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) was talking about earlier, we know that Russia has an integrated doctrine. In 2004, in the first stage of the Ukrainian war, Russia was using the tools of politics, oligarchs, power, information, warfare and economic warfare, along with espionage, assassination, blackmail and other things that the Russians have been doing for generations. That did not work, narrowly. From 2014, they moved to paramilitary violence, and that did not work either. Indeed, it brought the Ukrainian nation together almost more than any other event since 1991. Finally, since February, as we have seen tragically, Russia has gone for effectively full-scale conventional war. However, over the past 20 years, it has traced and used almost every tool of state power The Russians still believe in hybrid warfare, although in this stage of the war they are trying to achieve their political objectives using largely conventional means, which thus far is failing in sorts, but I am worried that a moral victory is not an absolute victory or a military victory, and they have got a significant chunk of Ukrainian territory. They have their land corridor. We will support our Ukrainian friends in the peace negotiations, but we know that the Russians will not give up what they physically hold at the time of those peace negotiations. At some point before any potential peace negotiations, the Ukrainians will have to take back that land When I was in Odesa and Mykolaiv the week before last, I was talking to the southern commander. For some of his regiments, he literally does not have a single armoured personnel carrier. He does not have a single infantry fighting vehicle to give to his units. He has three times as many men and women as he needs. He has almost none of the kit. Justifiably, all that kit is going via Kyiv, via the central Government—as is right—to the east. If there was the ability to be supported with enough kit and enough military equipment, the Ukrainians could open up a second front, and that would be of extreme importance, because they could potentially easily encircle and retake Kherson and move up to Berdiansk, destroying the Russian land corridor I worry about a few things in the coming months. I worry about the lack of kit, as I have just said. I know the Minister has the same list as we all do, but Ukraine still needs air defence, the infantry fighting vehicles and the artillery, hence the debate about 155 mm as opposed to different systems. I also worry that if Putin is victorious, we will live with nuclear blackmail for at least another decade or two. Moldova undoubtedly will be next, and then northern Kazakhstan, and then Russian-speaking chunks of the Baltic republics, so it does not stop at Ukraine, although it is the largest of those entities by far If Putin is not victorious, there will come a series of decision points in the next few months over whether the Russians wish to escalate up to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and I will be very relieved if we get to the end of this war without the use of nuclear weapons, because although much of what the Russians say about nuclear weapons is bluff, some of it is not. If Crimea was threatened, or if their seized land in Donbas was threatened, or if this whole enterprise of the war was threatened, there would be decision points coming up where the Russians would take that decision whether to use nuclear weapons On that point, I was talking to Fiona Hill this afternoon—Trump’s former Russia expert—and we were both concerned, as people who have been following the Russia and Ukraine for many years now, by the lack of thinking through of issues and of wargaming problems. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that at a NATO level, but also at a UK Government level, we are thinking through all potential scenarios in the coming weeks, months and potentially years ahead It is worth pointing out that this war has been proved wrong in almost every assessment. Putin terribly underestimated the Ukrainian reaction. The Ukrainians themselves did not believe the war would start for at least another six months. Germany believed it could prostate itself without any harm to the European order, and almost all nations failed to arm to deter this invasion. I worry that if we keep getting those assessments wrong, catastrophe awaits. We need to do the right thing, but we need to be assured in what we are doing.