Clive Efford
Main Page: Clive Efford (Labour - Eltham)Department Debates - View all Clive Efford's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(2 years ago)
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Mr Wallace
My hon. Friend makes a good point. This is really about bilateral enabling rather than NATO, as an organisation, but he is right. In fact, the Ukrainians are after ground attack aircraft more than air-to-air ones, and so, rather than the MiG-29s, the Su-30s and those sorts of aeroplanes. I will certainly raise it tomorrow with my US counterpart when I see him. It is important, but at the moment we are focused on the deep long-range artillery.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
While taking nothing away from the incredible performance of the Ukrainian army in defending its country, we all cannot help but be struck by how completely useless the Russian forces seem to be and how inefficient in organising themselves in this campaign. Having said that, there are increasing reports of mercenaries being used by the Russians. To what degree are they involved in this conflict, and is there any way to prevent them from getting into positions where they can participate?
Mr Wallace
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to point out the Russians’ woeful performance. I do not celebrate the loss of anyone’s life, and when I see the huge casualty rates of Russian soldiers, I think, as a former soldier, that it is a disgrace and a betrayal of those young men. It is hard to have sympathy when clearly it is not just the generals who are engaged in the war crime and butchery that we have seen, but mothers and wives in Russia are left behind because the arrogance of generals, poor performance and corruption has led many of those young men to their deaths.
On the hon. Gentleman’s point about mercenaries, yes, we see evidence of the Wagner Group now being actively deployed in Ukraine. We have seen some free Syrian fighters. We have seen media reports around Chechnya volunteers. The Wagner Group is a pain and a pest globally used—deniably, apparently, but it is not really that deniable—as an arm of the Kremlin. We have seen it in Africa. We see it in Mali now. We have seen it in Libya and elsewhere. The international community needs to come together to deal with the Wagner Group because whatever happens in Ukraine—its members are not getting very good kit and they are being some of the first to die, so it is not a great recruiting advert for it—it is going to be a problem that we have to deal with.