Russia’s Grand Strategy

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Bob Stewart

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

Following on from my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), it is worth saying that the Kiev International Institute of Sociology did a poll in eastern Ukraine and found that support for Russia had halved from 80% to 40% since Donbass was effectively invaded by Russia.

Nobody in today’s debate has stood up and said that Ukraine should join NATO. I accept my right hon. Friend’s argument that others have suggested it. NATO is one argument—my right hon. Friend says that is music to President Putin’s ears and he can exploit that—but this country is also a signatory to the 1994 Budapest agreement, which allowed Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal and have its borders protected by Russia, by us and by other countries, so I argue that we have a responsibility to Ukraine that falls outside our membership of NATO.

It is also worth putting on the record in the House that there are many reports of the ethnic cleansing of Tatars in Crimea. There are reports that 25,000 people have disappeared. There is a complete lockdown on the verification by outside international media of what is taking place in Crimea. To follow the comment by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) about the population of Crimea, I do not think we can simply dismiss the matter by saying that the people of Crimea want to remain in Russia, because there are many aspects to it.

One thing that has been overlooked in today’s debate so far is that we have talked about the geopolitical consequences of the grand strategy but we have not spoken about the consequences of the murder that is happening on the ground in various areas where Russia has a malign influence, whether that is Crimea, the Donbass, Georgia, Armenia or other regions. We should be careful not to soften how we describe the situation today.

[Bob Stewart]

This is just a quick point: the 1994 Budapest accord referred not just to Ukraine but to Kazakhstan, and today Russians have gone into Kazakhstan. If we look at the accord, we see that we have guaranteed the sovereign integrity of Kazakhstan.

[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.