Russia’s Grand Strategy
Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Bernard Jenkin(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
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.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
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?
Sir Bernard Jenkin
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.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on once again bringing this important debate to the House. I also congratulate all the Members who are attending it, many of whom were here for the previous debate a year ago.
“Russia’s grand strategy” is an interesting title, which leads to the question of what constitutes the counter-strategy. As was said a year ago and as has been said by several Members today, where the current actions have come from has been laid out along the line by Putin, whose actions are pretty clear. If you are a citizen of Lithuania, probably Belarus, east Poland or the Caucasus, you will notice that you are mentioned in Putin’s essay of 20 July, and you will certainly not sleep easily if you think that we will step back and let Russia win the battle in Ukraine.
I have a concern that many have touched on which is that a certain amount of hubris is starting to develop among western nations when they say, “We will win in Ukraine.” I very much hope that that is true, and we are doing everything we can to do so, but it does not seem to take into account the way in which Russia is now regrouping, restrategising and re-energising, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex said in his opening speech. We have to take a strong look at how we are going to supply Ukraine and how it is to move forward.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) has already made the point about Leopard tanks. European defence as a whole needs to take a long, hard look at itself. There can be no excuse for countries to say, “We will supply the tanks that are needed, but we need Germany to approve it” and for Germany to say, “Well, it’s up to the US.” It really is not up to the US. It is really up to nations within Europe. What concerns me, and Putin will be well aware of this when we are looking at the grand strategy, is that he will see that article 42 of the Lisbon treaty—the permanent structured co-operation, or PESCO, commitment—and where that leads to could spell a real problem for NATO.
Sir Bernard Jenkin
I reflect on the irony that one of the reasons why some of us wanted to leave the European Union was that it was insisting on having its own defence policy and armed forces, ostensibly in order to be independent of the United States, because of course it is NATO that guarantees peace in Europe and the EU would be incapable of doing so on its own. So it is a bit of an irony that Germany is now saying that it cannot send tanks to Ukraine until the US approves. It rather gives the lie to the idea that the EU is capable of even thinking independently of American defence policy.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. I do not seek to raise an EU Brexit issue here. I want to highlight where I think there is a real concern about the future of NATO, what Putin will be looking at and why it is so important that we do not allow Russia to be victorious.
The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) made a good speech, and I congratulate him on researching the speeches that we all made last year in this debate. It is important to know the context. He said that the Budapest memorandum was not worth the paper it was written on. That is an important statement to make because with Putin, nothing is worth the paper it is written on. When people talk about moving towards a negotiated settlement, what does that actually mean? If we get commitments on paper from Putin, it is frankly a waste of everybody’s time. The only way this conflict will be resolved is by winning it militarily.
Russia’s Grand Strategy
Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Bernard Jenkin(2 years, 3 months ago)
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Sir Bernard Jenkin
Indeed, and I will be explaining how these apparently disparate events are integrated in Russia’s grand strategy.
Beneath the cloak of this military noise and aggressive disinformation, in recent months—Kazakhstan is another example—Russia has been testing the west’s response with a succession of lower-level provocations, and I am afraid that we have signally failed to convince the Russians that we mind very much or are going to do very much about them. They have rigged the elections in Belarus, continued cyber-attacks on NATO allies, particularly in the Baltic states, and demonstrated the ability to destroy a satellite in orbit with a missile, bringing space into the arms race. They continue to develop whole new ranges of military equipment, including tanks with intelligent armour, fleets of ice breakers, new generations of submarines, including a new class of ballistic missile submarine, and the first hypersonic missiles.
They have carried out targeted assassinations and attempted assassinations in NATO countries using illegal chemical weapons, provoked a migration crisis in Belarus to destabilise Ukraine, and brought Armenia back under Russian control, snuffing out the democratic movement there. They have claimed sovereignty over 1.2 million square miles of Arctic seabed, including the north pole, which together contain huge oil and gas and mineral reserves. This followed the reopening of the northern sea route, with Chinese co-operation and support from France and Germany, which also hope to benefit. Meanwhile, the UK has expressed no intention of getting involved.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. He has just outlined some weapons that Russia has developed, but does he agree that the recklessness with which it has done so makes them even worse? The nuclear-powered Poseidon torpedo is cooled by seawater, and they feel that some of their hypersonic missiles are cooled by the air, so they have no concerns whatsoever about radioactive contamination from the delivery systems, let alone the payloads.
Sir Bernard Jenkin
My right hon. Friend is completely right. They are ruthless about pursuing what they regard as their own interests and disregard any other risk. Indeed, they are very far from being risk-averse, and the west has been far too risk-averse to compete with that. I will come to that later, but I thank my right hon. Friend for reminding us about the Poseidon torpedo, which is a nuclear-tipped torpedo—another escalation in the arms race.
Russia has also been rearming the Serbs in the western Balkans, including the Serb armed forces and the police in the Serb enclave of Bosnia, with the intention of destabilising the fragile peace that NATO achieved 30 years ago. Russia has stepped up its activity and influence in north and central Africa and has even started giving support to Catalan separatists in Spain. Russia uses its diaspora of super-rich Russian kleptocrats to influence western leaders and exploit centres such as the City of London to launder vast wealth for its expatriate clients.
Following the shaming chairmanship of Gazprom assumed by the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, so Russia has now recruited former French Prime Minister François Fillon to become a board director of the massive Russian petrochemicals company Sibur, with its headquarters in Moscow. The Russians must have contempt for us for being so gullible and corruptible. Our unilateral withdrawal from Kabul also vindicates their narrative that the west is weak, pointing out that we failed to stand by our moral principles or our friends.
Closer to home, look at how Gazprom has gradually and quietly reduced the gas supply to Europe, running down Europe’s gas reserves and causing prices to spike, leading to quadrupling gas and electricity prices in the UK. If Putin now chokes off the supply, it would take time and investment to put in place the necessary alternatives, which the Russians will seek to frustrate, as they already have in Algeria. Algeria was in a position to increase its supply of gas to EU, depending on the existing pipeline being upgraded, but a successful Russian influence campaign aimed at Germany and France prevented that from happening. Gazprom is enjoying its best ever year, so Putin can not only threaten western Europe’s energy supplies, but get the west to fund his war against the west.
Moreover, as gas supplies to Germany through Ukraine seem less reliable, so Germany continues to support Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that will bypass Ukraine, strengthening Russia’s hold over both countries immeasurably. At least we have the option of re-exploiting our gas reserves in the North sea. For as long as we require gas in our energy mix, we should be generating our own, not relying on imported gas from Europe.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, because he reinforces the point that I am trying to make: this is not just about whether Ukraine should join NATO and whether we should support Ukraine. We have committed ourselves to other countries, but today’s debate seems to be saying, “Well, tough luck. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
On the grand strategy, if we try to summarise what Russia is trying to achieve overall, let us look at the EAEC—the Eurasian Economic Community—which was formed in 2000 and is now known as the Eurasian Economic Union, which Putin holds dear. The analysis is that it needs 250 million people to work as a viable internal trading bloc that could then challenge other areas. To achieve that, the union needs the 43 million Ukrainians and their powerful agricultural output to succeed. When we look at the countries Moscow wants to bring into that pact, we see that it is in effect a neo-USSR. As has been said many times today, we have to stand up to the idea that Russia can come to the table saying, in effect, “Troops must be withdrawn from all the east European NATO countries; otherwise, we are going to invade.”
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) made an important point about the political situation in the USA. Let us not forget that then Vice-President Biden had an enormous fallout with President Obama about the surge into Iraq. He was always opposed to a lot of the interventions that took place. If we in this House know that, we can be damned sure that President Putin, sat in Moscow, knows that and he will be making that analysis.
I come back to where this all started: in the summer of 2013, when President Obama had said, “If you drop chemical weapons in Syria, that is a red line that we will not tolerate.” They dropped chemical weapons in Syria and President Obama pretty much just wrote a stiff letter to The Washington Post. We can track exactly what happened from that point: in less than a year President Putin walked into Crimea. Again, what did we do? Nothing. We did not do anything.
Sir Bernard Jenkin
May I briefly remind my right hon. Friend of what happened with the invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008? President Bush moved the sixth fleet into the Black sea, ready to confront Russian aggression, and the invasion stopped. We are going to need that kind of response now; of course, the two treaties and the hypersonic weapons are intended to pre-empt any possibility of that kind of response.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who reinforces the point that I was making. This is where we get the Jekyll and Hyde—or the paradox, if you like—of President Trump. In early 2017, there was another chemical weapon attack in Syria and, within a short space of time, the American Administration under President Trump launched 26 Tomahawk missiles on strategic targets in Syria. For the rest of that presidency, nothing else happened in that arena. However, President Trump’s actions exactly a year ago today were manna from heaven in Moscow, because that idea of undermining democracy, destabilising the west and creating divisions in societies is one reason why there is such ambiguity about whether the USA would support its NATO allies in Europe, as it is dealing with such a split society at home. We could say that, over the last 10 to 15 years, Russian objectives in the USA were invited by President Obama, created by President Trump and too much of a concern to tackle for President Biden. The debate should not be about America and its entirely different Government, but I am afraid that it is relevant to the conversation.
We must accept a couple of things. My hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) often talks about Nord Stream 2, and he is right to do so. I do not believe for one second that it will be switched off or not commissioned. It will be switched on—that will happen—and that will put the Poles and people in eastern Europe in a very difficult position. However, that boat sailed 20 years ago and we are where we are. This country and its leadership have tried to point out the folly of that programme, and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly talks about it all the time, but I do not see how anything will change. That is where we are today.
We must come to some conclusions. As the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar) said, the cold war exists again—it started the moment that Putin walked into Crimea. The invasion of Crimea changed the last 25 years of policy at NATO in Brussels. It obviously had a defensive policy up to the end of the cold war and then more of a political one, but that changed everything. It is now both political and defensive. However, the progress made in a very short period—almost, if you will, in a panic about what happened—shows that we are back in a cold war status, and NATO recognises that. As we are in a cold war status, let us not even entertain the argument of people saying, “We don’t want another cold war.” It is there—accept it.
Now, we lived through a cold war for 50 or 60 years—what did we do? Surely everything is about counterbalance. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said, when the invasion of Georgia came, President Bush sent the sixth fleet in. That was a counterbalancing, reactive measure. Many of us across the House recognise the importance of renewing Trident, because that is about counterbalances. There are those who say, “Trident will never be used,” but we know that it is used every single day. It would be a failure of policy if we ever fired the weapons—but by then none of us would care because we would be at 10,000° F. The reality is that that weapon works every day, and counterbalance is what we must do.
We come, therefore, to a simple conclusion. Today, our constituents—especially the poorest in our constituencies—are suffering from gas prices that are being manipulated from Moscow. That is a fact. There was a big argument about what the Treasury can do, but the reality is that we are allowing these things to happen because we are not standing up against them. A simple message must go to the Treasury today. In the cold war, we spent 5% of GDP on defence. We cannot carry on with today’s level of defence spending. It must increase, because we are back to where we were 30 years ago. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said that it is realpolitik, and it is. We must realise that we are in a cold war and that we must increase defence spending. Counterbalance is the only way to stop the situation escalating.