Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Motion to Take Note

Moved by

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the International Relations and Defence Committee Ukraine: a wake-up call (1st Report, HL Paper 10).

My Lords, I speak today as chairman of the International Relations and Defence Committee to introduce our report, Ukraine: A Wake-up Call. The report provides a sobering, and now urgent, assessment of the implications of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine for United Kingdom defence policy and the broader security of Europe. Before delving into the detail of the report, I thank the members of the committee, including my predecessor as chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde; the excellent clerk and staff, who put a huge amount of work into the report over the summer; and the witnesses who appeared before the committee.

The findings in our report are stark. The war in Ukraine has shattered the assumptions underpinning western defence thinking since the end of the Cold War. This is indeed a wake-up call not just for us but for the whole of Europe. The war has exposed critical gaps in our capabilities and the fragility of our defence industrial base—all because of our assumption, now revealed as wrong, that future conflicts would be short and limited.

The first conclusion of the report is that NATO deterrence failed. President Putin calculated that the West lacked the political will and the military capability to stop him. This calculation, tragically, was in part correct: our deterrence posture has been found wanting. We must rebuild deterrence through improved military capability, clear messaging and a united front with our allies. This has taken on a new significance following the rift created by the heated exchanges between President Trump and President Zelensky last week and the continuing developments this week.

Another significant development since the publication of our report has been the Prime Minister’s recent announcement of an increase in defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 and the ambition to increase it to 3% in the next Parliament. While welcome, our report concluded that 2.5% of GDP may not be enough to meet the UK’s growing defence needs or plug existing gaps. Subsequent events have underlined that point.

This leads me to the current state of our Armed Forces. The Army in particular has already shrunk to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era, and it is questionable whether it will be able to field sufficient fighting forces beyond an initial deployment. The Prime Minister has said that he is willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine to help guarantee the country’s security. While I fully understand his objective, it is difficult to imagine how the Army would be able to maintain a credible deterrent force in Ukraine, for any extended length of time—let alone fulfil its other obligations, which seem likely to grow—without increasing in size significantly.

Crucially, we must rebuild the appeal of military service to the next generation. We also need to revitalise our reserves. Ukraine has shown that well-trained and properly equipped reserve forces can, literally, make all the difference. Ours are woefully underfunded. We must ensure that they are ready to mobilise at scale, when needed, and that numbers are boosted so that they can also be deployed to protect critical national infrastructure at home.

My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley. I think it is an appropriate thing to do in a week when the House has been debating the hereditary Peers Bill. He is the inheritor of one of the longest-standing peerages that there that there are, I think, but in his time here—and I have now been here for 15 years—he has made a major contribution to the House. I would just like to put that on record.

The report is right that we need a wake-up call, and I think that there are already signs in the way that Keir Starmer is responding to the crisis that that wake-up call is being heeded. I know a little bit about Ukraine. From the late 1990s to 2004, Tony Blair appointed me to head a No. 10 delegation to meet regularly, which we did every three or four months, with the Ukraine presidential Administration. I was lucky, of course, to be given lots of nice trips around that wonderful country to the Crimea, where I sat in Joe Stalin’s chair at Yalta, and to wonderful cities such as Odessa, Lviv and Kyiv itself.

It was always clear to me in those conversations that there was a great division in Ukraine between those who saw themselves as totally dependent on Russia for their security and their energy and those who wanted to become what I would call a normal European country. Of course, Blair was a very strong advocate of European enlargement, so I could readily say to them that the Labour Government of the time respected their European vocation. Indeed, when I went to Brussels with my noble friend Lord Mandelson and the trade talks started with Ukraine, one of the great things that caused the revolution on the streets in Ukraine, both in 2007 and in 2013, was the feeling that they wanted to be part of Europe, not a Soviet satellite.

I think our Prime Minister has done really well, and I am glad to see that so many people on the Opposition agree on that. There is nothing wrong in principle with President Trump’s wish for peace, and he is right, of course, that there is the most awful killing going on. Not least is the brutality of what Russia has done in Ukraine—and we should not forget this in all these discussions—particularly in taking children from Ukraine to be Russianised. That is absolutely shocking, and it should not be forgotten in any peace discussions.

My Lords, I start by thanking our previous chair of the committee, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, and our current chair, the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and indeed our clerk and her colleagues for the tremendous work that they have done in drawing together the information that emerged in our inquiry and the many thoughts and reactions that we had as members of the Select Committee.

Much has happened since its publication in September 2024, but the thrust of our report remains absolutely relevant and on target. It was, as its title says, A Wake-up Call then; surely the events of the past few weeks have shaken out of their slumber those who did not recognise the urgency of the call at that time and continued to sleepwalk towards disaster. The report sets out with great clarity how Europe as a whole—and our own country, I am afraid—has failed to pay attention to the drift into what I have described as a third global conflict. I have spoken about this in your Lordships’ House before, especially after the Russian invasion of Crimea because, even at that time, the direction in which we were going was clear.

However, as in so many other fields, people tend to live in the world that they wish existed, rather than in the one that they actually inhabit. Europe in general preferred to believe that major international wars in Europe were a thing of the past. After 9/11, many academics and analysts wrote about the new wars, which would consist only of terrorism and intra-state disruption, but insisted that major wars between developed states would not arise. This was an extension of the thought that was around in the later 20th century that technological developments, especially after 1945 and the existence of nuclear weapons, were so damaging and destructive that the truth was that no one would actually contemplate them.

In fact, new technologies rarely replace the old technologies of warfare completely. They simply add more weapons, more tactics and more strategies to the armamentarium. A hundred years ago, most warfare took place on land and sea; then, air became important and, subsequently, space did so as well. But, as if four spaces were not enough in which to have conflict, we developed the cyber world, and we are now in effect engaged in a global conflict in cyberspace.

My Lords, I also have the privilege of being a member of the International Relations and Defence Committee. I will confine my remarks in this debate to one of the points in chapter 3 of our report, “Nurturing partnerships”. This looks at the concept of defence in a more holistic and big-picture way than just the size of the Armed Forces or the supply chains and capability of weapons, crucial though these things self-evidently are.

Alliances, partnerships and reputation also underpin our defence posture and, in the case of Ukraine, have exposed an important weakness when we consider the situation globally and long-term. We need to think very carefully about the response of the countries which we generally call the global South to the support from the UK for Ukraine, partly so that a rounded view of the current situation can take place, but also so that the UK in formulating its future defence strategies and capabilities can be realistic about those alliances, partnerships and reputational risks on which our engagement in any future combat situation might depend.

As the report states:

“International engagement is integral to deterrence and escalation management”.

At the time of the report’s publication—I am certainly not going to go into the astonishing change in voting behaviour by the US at the UN recently—the UN’s 193 member states had voted on six emergency special session resolutions on Ukraine. Most countries supported the first of these, which condemned Russia’s invasion, with only one-quarter of states not in favour. All those that abstained or voted against were countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and south-east Asia: the global South. This pattern held in subsequent votes and few countries in any of those regions have imposed any sanctions on Russia or given any material support to Ukraine.

My Lords, our Select Committee was half way through its taking of evidence when we were rudely interrupted by a general election. It is a tribute to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and his predecessor in the chair, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, that we picked up the pieces after the election and completed this report. It is a tribute as well to our secretariat, who were terrific.

If I were to summarise the lessons we learned in our report from the war in Ukraine, I would say that they are a surprising mixture of the old and the new. On the old side, we have the front line and the trenches, which are eerily reminiscent of conflicts over 100 years ago and which showed the importance of mass in military operations. On the new side, we have the evidence of the huge importance of drones, which, as we say in paragraph 183, are ubiquitous in Ukraine for intelligence, target acquisition and reconnaissance, as well as for direct attacks. Then, aside from the mechanics of warfare is the international context in which the war is being fought, on which I very much agree with everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, said. What has the war told us about the standing of the West in the international community, in particular those countries of the global South?

First, on the importance of mass, as we say in paragraph 34,

“the evidence we heard points to the current size of the British Army being inadequate”.

Before we even begin to talk about increasing the size of the Army, we need to focus a little on the immediate problem of the apparent inability to recruit enough people to maintain present strengths. The figures we had were that, up to July 2024, 11,940 people joined the regular Armed Forces, while, in the same period, 15,700 left. We need a 25% increase just to stand still. I would like to hear from the Minister the strategy we now have for delivering the numbers required, particularly in the light of the increased funding announced last week. How much will be accomplished by retaining existing personnel and how much by new recruits? I am sure he agrees with me that retention has great advantages because, in a sense, you already have the finished product.

My Lords, I was not a member of this excellent committee, but I think that this is an absolutely admirable report that is amazingly timely, very important and, indeed, a wake-up call to us all. Although I was not a member, I take a little slice of pride as a godparent of the committee because the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and I had to push the authorities very hard to get the committee set up, which we eventually did, and it has been an outstanding success. This is one of the best reports it has ever produced. I have three points to add, quickly, to the excellent introduction from the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, in which he covered most of the things I want to say.

First, we should note what he said about reserves. At the moment, our reserves, which used to be called territorials, number 34,280—although I am not quite sure about that; there is a lot of dispute about the number. That is on top of the 74,000 regular Army troops, making the total strength of the Army, Navy and Air Force 134,000, or whatever it is. That can be enlarged very quickly. People forget how rapidly, in the 1930s, the reserves went from being held at about 200,000 into the millions, and then merged totally into the Army. All that happened in a matter of weeks. I cannot claim to remember in the case of my father, because I was two years old at the time, but I am told that he had about a fortnight to transform from being a retired regular back into a territorial, and then went into full combat organisation and was in the desert within a month of the war being announced on 3 September. The whole speed of this thing can be greatly improved, as the report rightly says, and to have bureaucracy slowing it all down is a lot of nonsense. We need to look at that very clearly; the call-up can be much quicker. That is my first point.

Secondly, this report is so good because it brings home that the whole issue is much wider than the picture books and child versions of what warfare is about. We think about the trenches and the front line, and it is absolutely true about the drones that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, just eloquently mentioned. The sheer numbers—the report mentioned 2 million—that Ukraine alone is mobilising can really change the whole nature and drive people back into the trenches like in 1914. I am told that, within 200 miles on either side of the front line, and certainly on the Russian side, anyone who comes out of a trench for a smoke—or, dare I say, a pee—is instantly spotted and probably dead within three or four minutes. This is the changed nature of the whole pattern of the front line.

My Lords, I congratulate the members of the International Relations and Defence Committee on this excellent report. It is usually a matter of great regret that we are not able to debate such Select Committee reports until long after they are published, but in this case the delay is a positive advantage. Why? To echo the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, it is because, if the war in Ukraine was a wake-up call for us and our European partners in NATO, surely the events of the past few weeks in Munich and Washington have served to tip us entirely out of our cosy collective bed on to the cold, hard floor. The recommendations made in the report are based on a forensic analysis of the evidence and are well judged. I support them all. However, the context has clearly changed—and not for the better.

We all want NATO to survive and to continue the invaluable work it has done over so many decades to guard our collective security. The United States has been at the core of that endeavour, and we wish American involvement to continue. I believe that it will, but we can no longer expect it to be on the scale that it has been in the past. This goes beyond the vagaries of one President or any sense of growing American isolationism. Senior officials in Washington, both civilian and military, have made it clear that, despite their enduring commitment to NATO, they are substantially shifting their weight of effort from Europe to the Pacific. This should not surprise us. This development has been under way and slowly building in momentum over many years. That the American shift now coincides with a dramatically increased risk to our security has just served to open European eyes that, for too long, have remained resolutely shut.

It is now starkly apparent that if we in Europe do not provide adequately for our own security, no one else will. It is also clear that shouldering this responsibility is the surest way of retaining American involvement in NATO. For too long, we and our European partners have scrabbled around in the smallest margins of public expenditure to fund our defence. It was inappropriate in the past; it would be utter folly now. There is a growing acknowledgement by many political leaders in Europe that we are in an era of rearmament. This is right, but we need to define and follow through on what that means. Europe’s militaries, including our own, are too small as fighting units, inadequately armed and lacking in key strategic capabilities. Rearmament means making good these deficiencies. That will take two things: time and money. We have the first, but none to waste.

My Lords, those were wise words from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. I join him in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and his committee.

All seem to agree that the context within which the report was drafted has changed dramatically. Obviously, one would be the announcement by our Prime Minister of an increase in defence expenditure and more to come, but also the flurry of announcements made since Munich by the President and the Vice-President, which makes some argue whether we can still rely on the US and whether all the assumptions we have made since the Second World War about transatlantic relations are put in question. Are we still confident that the US will come to our aid? I note that the former US ambassador to Moscow said over the past few days that we need to rethink the side on which the US is now, because there have been so many things said by the President which favour Moscow, and there has been no criticism of Moscow but much criticism of President Zelensky, who was lectured, indeed humiliated, when he visited the White House and may yet again, Canossa like, have to go on his knees when next week he visits, or is likely to visit, the President, possibly with President Macron and our Prime Minister. The question of trust must arise and must affect all our relations, including our reliance on the US for the nuclear deterrent.

There is an old adage, “Think it, don’t say it", and we have to understand our Prime Minister when he bites his tongue, I guess, about things he would like to say about the utterances of President Trump, but he cannot say them, and we are more able to do so.

You can talk about the responsibility for the war. President Trump mentioned Ukraine as starting the war. He wants to increase the G6 to the G7, and it is sad to see the way in which Congress, or at least the Republicans, a few days ago sycophantically rallied around the President, yet a few months ago, they would have given just the same response to President Zelensky. Now they exult in the President’s new clothes.