Russia’s Grand Strategy

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of Russia’s grand strategy.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate again, because I secured a debate last year about the same topic. Then, I outlined Putin’s global policy and I set out how Russia was threatening Ukraine as part of a campaign of blackmail and hybrid warfare directed at the Americans and NATO. I explained how Russia’s grand strategy was being conducted across the whole spectrum of foreign, defence, security and domestic policy. I discussed Russia’s warlike strategic headquarters at its national defence management centre at the old Russian army staff HQ on the Moskva river. Today, I make the same fundamental point as I made last year: Russia has a grand strategy, but we do not.

The idea of global Britain demands a global strategy, which means grand strategy and must be a whole-of-Government enterprise. It is fair to ask, “If Russia has an effective grand strategy, why has it not done better in Ukraine?”, because when the war started, all the assessments predicted that the Russian army would be much more successful. The answer is simple: Putin’s decision bypassed the usual strategy process and went against the views of his general staff.

This is about the difference between policy and strategy. Policy is the aim—the political objective—and strategy is the interactive process by which that policy objective might be achieved. Putin was driven by his obsession to subjugate Ukraine. He overrode the general staff’s strategy process and disregarded the limitations of the army. It could be considered odd that he did that, but he had used lethal force before with great success. In Georgia and Crimea, surprise and speed brought him a quick victory, although on those occasions the general staff were behind him; in Ukraine, they advised him against going to war.

Of course, Putin is not the first to override his general staff in pursuit of an obsessive policy; the same was Hitler’s undoing. It seemed, until a week ago, that it might also be Putin’s, but he has learned from his mistake and has rediscovered strategy. Last week’s appointment of the chief of the general staff Gerasimov as the overall commander brings the general staff back into the planning and command chain. Other commanders, warlords and private military companies will be brought under his authority. As Gerasimov gets a grip of things, I am afraid that we must expect to see Russian performance in Ukraine improve considerably.

Russia is not giving up, so Ukraine’s survival will now depend on western military and economic help being delivered a lot more rapidly and in far greater quantities than it has been so far. Unfortunately, the approach of the UK’s current foreign and defence integrated review refresh process is underpinned by an explicit but premature assumption that Russia will lose in Ukraine and will then prioritise investment in maritime, particularly sub-surface, as well as space, cyber and special forces. It argues that Russia will not invest meaningfully in land forces, but our eastern European and Nordic colleagues do not share that view.

The integrated review refresh risks over-optimism that would allow us to tilt our posture and capabilities away from the most immediate threat in Europe and, instead, towards long-term gambles on technological superiority and a focus on the Indo-Pacific. AUKUS and the tilt to the Indo-Pacific are certainly policies, but they are not backed up by any strategy process to determine if they can be achieved with the limited ways and means that we have available.

The policies of global Britain and AUKUS are admirable and, conveniently, cheaper, but they are not enough on their own. Painful though it is, we need much stronger land power as well. We must still gear up to defend the UK and to deter a war in Europe against a peer enemy. Of course, Russia will invest in sub-surface, space and cyber, but it shows no sign of dispensing with large-scale ground forces, heavy armour and artillery. If anything, the Ukraine war has convinced the general staff of the need to reinvest in their army.

The Nordics and the Poles know that Russia is a land animal. Strategic missile submarines excepted, Russia sees its navy as flank protection for a land war and its air force as the third dimension of that land war. Despite evident lack of progress and perceived weaknesses, Putin shows no signs of intending to stop, of scaling down his demands, of looking for a way out or of making serious proposals for peace. In fact, Ukraine is expecting a new all-out assault in the spring or even sooner.

In the debate last year, I made the point that I felt that we were already in a cold war, which some disagreed with. Does my hon. Friend think that our European allies have changed their position on that or is there still a resistance to accepting that a new cold war is well and truly under way?

I think that we are in denial of not just a cold war, but a hot war. The hot war that is being conducted in Ukraine is laced with rhetoric and invective about NATO being the threat and about the United States of America provoking that threat, so NATO and the United States must somehow be defeated in this war. If we do not understand that Putin is now conducting a hybrid and political war against Europe and NATO, backed by a hot war in Ukraine, we are not yet living in the real world.

If the process of reinvigorating Russia’s armed forces and preparing for a further assault on Ukraine is not derailed and Putin is successful, by 2024, the west will face a more formidable Russia that believes that it can establish its place in a future world order by force of arms. This is a long-term strategic challenge that requires a long-term strategic response from the UK Government, all European Governments and NATO.

Putin’s strategy depends on time. We all admire Ukraine’s bravery and agility, which have left the Russian army in something of a quagmire, but it would be an epic tragedy if we now allowed Russia the time to mass its forces, so that its brutal war of attrition could become overwhelming. It is crucial for the west to increase the tempo of its supply of weapons systems to Ukraine, so that Ukraine, rather than Russia, can be first to develop the mobile formations necessary to break the current battlefield deadlock. The reality is that Russia’s whole grand strategy is on a knife edge and the next few months could be crucial.

We should not be deterred by Putin’s so-called red lines. In war and crisis, red lines are political and flexible. We proved that when Russia’s build-up to the invasion last year crossed several NATO red lines, and we did nothing. Likewise, Putin’s incorporation of Donbas into the Russian Federation was intended to set up a red line of Russian territory being attacked, but when Ukraine attacked, it turned out there was no red line.

On the point about how we in the west might have set some red lines, I thought at the time that the west was not being firm enough in the red lines it was laying down. What we saw in mid-February was the US President and others talking only about sanctions, and how there would be nothing more than sanctions as a consequence of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I regard the United States as our closest and most important ally and personally I love the United States of America, but on its response to this crisis—it has been voluminous compared with that of the rest of Europe and a lot of money has been devoted to it—its signalling has been very weak. What matters in wartime is not what red lines we set; it is what we actually do.

I am afraid our own Government made a terrible error when we set a red line about the use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2013, and then what did we do? We backed off when chemical weapons were used. The effect of that has been to weaken the influence of the United States, the United Kingdom and the whole of the west in the countries that really count in this war as potential allies or neutral states—for example, the Gulf states, which despaired of our lack of resolve in that conflict. Red lines are less important than what we do, and what we must now do is send far more matériel into this conflict to support the Ukrainians, so that the Russians are deterred or fail to achieve what they attempt to do.

On my hon. Friend’s point about doing as opposed to just saying, with which I entirely agree, does he agree with me that part of this is that the German Government should now release their legal hold over the export of Leopard tanks from European allies to the Ukrainians to allow them a chance to counter-attack?

I certainly think that is the case, and I think the constant fear of our escalating the conflict has been misplaced because Putin has escalated the conflict anyway. There is nothing we can do to prevent him from escalating. In fact, the signal we have sent by being too timid and too slow in sending support into Ukraine has encouraged him to escalate. There is no deterrence in timidity, which is what too many western Governments have shown.

To drag together that point with something my hon. Friend said earlier, surely such timidity also follows failure to have the capability to be more assertive. In other words, now that their defence budgets have been stripped out, western Governments are worried that any attempt to try to show that they are more belligerent, shall we say, exposes the very fact that most of them are simply incapable of delivering any of that belligerence at all.

I entirely agree with that, but in more direct response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), the timidity of the Germans not just to release their own tanks, but to allow the tanks of other nations, such as Poland, to be sent into the conflict to support the Ukrainians sends more than a signal of timidity—it is appeasement. I am sorry to use that word, which I know has a loaded connotation, but it is appeasement. However, we must congratulate Germany on having come a very long way from the days of Gazprom being chaired by a former Chancellor of Germany and Angela Merkel making Germany dependent on Russian gas as a matter of policy. We have come a long way, and we should welcome the fact that Germany has committed to spend €100 billion more on defence, but we are still yet to see what that really means, and it means nothing if Germany is not prepared to help send heavy armour into this conflict.

If I may say so, we have committed to send 12 tanks, but why not 120 tanks? What are our tanks for? Are they there to sit around on Salisbury plain and in Germany to decorate the British Army’s capability, or should we tool them up and get them into this conflict so that the taxpayer can actually get value for money out of this investment? If necessary, we can launch an urgent operational requirement to acquire some more tanks to replace those that we will probably not ever see again in our own country.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I will, but I do want to press on, and I will probably be overrunning my time very shortly.

I will try not to interrupt my hon. Friend for too long. Does he agree with me that the timidity on the part of the UK is exampled by the fact that when I asked Zelensky how many air defence missile systems he had, he said 10%—that is all? When I got back to the UK, there was an email from a well-known Cabinet Minister saying, “Be very quiet about this, because we do not want to stress the fact that we are giving him so few.” Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a prime example of such timidity?

We should not trash what the Government have done, which is considerable, but we should point out that the failure to do much more—much more—is going to cost us in the short term, the medium term and the long term. We must also dispense with the false hopes that some kind of regime change would be likely to reverse the Russian urge to control its near abroad, or to use its army as a tool for suppressing dissent and keeping the country together.

My conclusion is that if the UK is going to help lead the NATO alliance, which protects Europe against Russia, we need meaningful land power to make an effective contribution, supported by mobile air cover and a Navy to deliver the Army to where the action is. For that, we need a new mobilisation system to come out of the integrated review refresh, and a procurement system to back it up that looks much more like a system of urgent operational requirements, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford suggested during the statement earlier this week, than the absurdly slow and costly peacetime procurement process that we somehow insist we have to maintain, despite its delivering—or not delivering at all—equipment, at vast expense, with limited capability.

This demands a drastic—even revolutionary—change of UK grand strategy, which I suppose is why we seem to avoid having one and, I suspect, why the IRR is stuck where it is. In the long term, how do we find a way to stop burgeoning state-backed health and welfare systems crowding out defence and security spending? In the short term, Whitehall in general and the Ministry of Defence in particular must accept that, if we continue to spend defence money as we have done over the last 20 years, we really are lost. We need a complete revolution in defence acquisition and procurement, making it look and feel much more like a continuing series of urgent operational requirements—a system based on wartime emergency procedures that, historically, delivered much cheaper and more timely equipment. We need to regain the ability to adapt our force structure, kit and tactics to outmatch an active enemy, just as the Ukrainians have done and the Poles are doing.

I agree with nearly everything the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) has just said, but I am going to make a very different speech, not to disagree with him, but just to put a different tone to this. I have believed for a long time that it is essential to Russia’s grand strategy that it must expand: we knew that in 2008 and again in 2014, and, frankly, we should all have been thoroughly aware of it long before 24 February 2022 when the second invasion of Ukraine happened. I am absolutely clear that we must make sure that Putin and the Russian Federation loses.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to get more materiel to our friends and allies in Ukraine. I do not, however, think that is just a matter for the UK and I worry that sometimes the UK provides, let us say, 12 tanks and Spain provides two and France provides three and none of them work together. The time has come for us all to sit down as allies and ask how we are going to ramp up production of perhaps one or two brands of tank so we are deliberately and solely constructing them to get them to Ukraine as fast as possible. People have been arguing for that for at least a year now, so it is a shame we have not got on with it.

The hon. Gentleman is right because logistically that would make it far easier for the Ukrainians. Leopard is the obvious choice because it is used by so many other allied countries, but German export law currently prevents that unless the Germans waive it. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that they should do that to allow the Ukrainians the Leopards they need?

Yes. I do not do this very often but I was saying “Hear, hear” earlier in agreement with a point the right hon. Gentleman made. I am reluctant to be too down on the Germans, however, for the simple reason that they have had to make a very dramatic and sudden about-turn in their whole understanding of their defence policy, but they do have to get over this hurdle. Many other countries in Europe want them to and are eagerly pressing them to, and the time is long past for them to do so. Perhaps we need a European security treaty to deal with some of these issues and get that materiel to where it is most needed and in a way that it can be readily used.

I want to talk about something slightly different: how we can help Ukraine rebuild. So far, along with many other countries in Europe, we have frozen but not seized assets. On 9 September 2022 a joint statement by the World Bank, the European Commission and the Government of Ukraine estimated that the current cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine was $349 billion. That is now a four-month-old estimate and the sum will grow exponentially as the war continues. We have all seen the pictures of what has happened in Dnipro; we know of the railways, roads and bridges that will have to be reconstructed, let alone the schools, the housing and the rest. Ukraine is going to need a very substantial amount of money.

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly was in Washington in the first week of December, and at that time 42% of residential properties in the whole of Ukraine—not just on the frontline—were uninhabitable. That serves to put some flesh on the hon. Gentleman’s point.