Russia’s Grand Strategy

John Spellar Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[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.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman’s last statement will be very much welcomed by workers in the gas and oil industry, but was it not also remiss of the Government a few years ago not to continue with the gas storage facility in the North sea, which would have provided us with some resilience? We should also have been working with other countries to build up their reserves, to diminish the ability of the Kremlin and Gazprom to blackmail us.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

All I can say is, do not start me on the lamentable incoherence of 20 years of UK energy policy, because it is a disgrace, and something that we could have done so much better and that this Government are starting to repair, but it will take some time.

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[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

As we made clear earlier, there is considerable concern about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ukraine, particularly on its frontier. In today’s debate, as has been well introduced by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), we need to look at that on a much broader spectrum—basically one of a revanchist Russia that is seeking to rewrite the end of the cold war. It is seeking to recreate the Soviet Union; to increase its influence, if not its direct acquisition—I do not think it would rule that out, however—of the former Soviet Republics; and to establish hegemony over the former countries of the Warsaw pact, as well as to keep Finland in a state of neutrality and to have considerable influence in the western Balkans. That is very clear. Most of those countries are members of NATO and of the EU, and some of them are members of both. I think that explains the Kremlin’s enormous hostility to both those institutions, as it seeks to do everything it can to undermine them.

We need to recognise the nature of that threat, to which the hon. Gentleman drew attention very effectively. It is not just a military threat. We talk about the 100,000 troops on the border, and that is significant, although there might be a tendency to overestimate the efficacy of much of Russia’s equipment. Although Russia may be making advances and developments in hypersonics and so on, quite a lot of its other equipment—we see this particularly with its surface fleet—is distinctly substandard. We need a strong evaluation of that, and that would be much easier had Whitehall not dispersed so much of its Russia-watching capability after the fall of the Berlin wall, leaving a great gap. There may be some attempts to recreate that, but I do not think we have anything like the ability we once had to observe and understand what is going on.

That is also tied to integration. The hon. Member described very well the integrating mechanisms within the system—it is very reminiscent of the Soviet system during the cold war—to integrate all areas: cultural life, political life and industrial espionage, so that they work together in a co-ordinated way. If I asked the Minister where in Whitehall was the UK’s integration along those lines—I am not aware of it—I think he would be hard pressed to put his finger on it. What frustrates me enormously is that in the past, we had quite a good record on this. During the second world war, the Political Warfare Executive—headed up, interestingly enough, by Richard Crossman, subsequently a Labour Member of Parliament and Labour Minister—pulled together journalistic and psychological expertise, and it had an extremely effective record.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I want very briefly to relay two conversations that I have had about strategic thinking in Government. One was with a person who is now the former Prime Minister, who said, “Oh, Bernard thinks we should have a strategy, but I think we should remain flexible,” completely misunderstanding what strategy is. The second was with a Minister who is now serving in a very senior capacity in this Government, and who said, “What is our strategy? We think we have to work with NATO.” In this country, we are so far behind understanding what strategy is that we have a very great task in front of us.

[John Spellar]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. Of course, many people quote Eisenhower as saying that all strategic plans break down on first contact with the enemy. Of course, they forget the next sentence: nevertheless, it is still necessary to plan, and to have a framework.

It is also necessary to look at this issue, as our opponents do, in a broad spectrum to see how all the areas interlink. That is the problem that we faced for some years with industrial espionage, for example, although people are waking up to that to quite a degree. Traditionally, all the way through, there has been industrial espionage by the Russians, and more recently by the Chinese, but there has been a reluctance and a failure to see it in such a way. Many of those who criticise such an approach say, “You are trying to recreate the cold war.” No, we are not. The cold war has already been restarted.

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

As far as I can see, President Putin reanimated a sense of hostility—people can call it a cold war, or whatever they like—in his Munich conference speech in 2007. Since then, what has been so blindingly depressing about western Governments, and specifically the UK Government, is that we desperately tried, really until 2014, to pretend that that had not happened. I am afraid that that just shows that it is better to face the reality, however uncomfortable it is, than to behave like an ostrich.

[John Spellar]

Such behaviour, I am afraid, has been a regular feature. Everybody should be very clear. Putin only recently described the break-up of the Soviet Union as

“a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union”.

We should remember that he previously called its collapse the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Oh that mine enemy would write a book! He has made it very clear where he stands, and therefore we have to respond to that effectively. We look at the troops in Ukraine, and talk about the little green men. We must also look right the way through the middle east and north Africa, and indeed further down into Africa. The Wagner Group is a so-called private sector operation, but it is licensed by, closely related to and deeply embedded in the Kremlin, and operates on its behalf and at its behest.

Slightly diverting from the Political Warfare Executive, in the post-war period under Ernest Bevin the information research department was created at the Foreign Office, precisely to run a full spectrum influence war in order to shape opinion in the UK and more widely in the western world and, as part of that operation, to look at and operate on the structural weaknesses within the Soviet bloc. If Soviet communism is an effective way of seizing power, it is a lousy way of running economies and societies. We therefore have to take the fight to them.

That is not just about agitation, propaganda and trying to mirror the disinformation and lies; one of the most effective weapons against such authoritarian and dictatorial regimes is to tell the truth about what is going on in their societies. We should always remember why the Russians, the Chinese and others are so afeared of their own populations knowing and understanding the truth. There is ample historical evidence from the last 100 years that many of those who run such societies and their secret police know much better than we do how unstable those societies are, and how thin is the level of support. That does not mean that they are not dangerous, because one of the ways of trying to mask that is external adventurism and trying to create the prospect of a threat abroad.

It has been rightly said that NATO is not an offensive alliance; it is a defensive alliance. I do not understand—I put this to the Minister—why we are not providing defensive equipment to the Ukrainian forces, not in order to take the fight to Russia but to allow them to defend themselves effectively against any incursion. Military doctrine should say that the defender has a significant advantage. We have seen, for example, in a number of recent conflicts that heavy armour can be severely impacted by the use of quite cheap drones.

I am not trying to create such an expertise, but merely questioning whether we are looking at providing defensive equipment to protect a sovereign country—a country guaranteed by the Budapest agreement, signed by Russia and ourselves—and why we are not supporting it in maintaining its independence. This is also because of the signals to elsewhere in the world, which others have talked about, such as the other countries formerly in the Soviet Union, particularly the Baltics, which have been feeling the pressure both of military exercises and indeed of intelligence operations for a very considerable period.

I am mindful of your strictures on time, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I would just like to say this in closing. Some of those countries will be saying that this is destabilising. Actually, I think that recognising the nature of the system and being not aggressive or assertive but robust, while indicating that we stand by our rights and by our friends and negotiating in a proper and effective way with the Russians on that basis—not giving concessions just for having talks, but trying, as we did in the cold war, to reach containment and a modus vivendi—is the route ahead. However, that requires robust action, and, in the words of someone who was involved in those discussions previously, “Trust, but verify”.

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[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

At the beginning of March 1946, less than a week before Churchill delivered his iron curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, the joint intelligence sub-committee of the chiefs of staff concluded:

“The long-term aim of the Russian leaders is to build up the Soviet Union into a position of strength and greatness fully commensurate with her vast size and resources.”

The JIC admitted that firm intelligence was difficult to obtain, as

“Decisions are taken by a small group of men, the strictest security precautions are observed, and far less than in the case in the Western Democracies are the opinions of the masses taken into account.”

Whilst

“likely to be deterred by the existence of the atomic bomb”,

of which the Americans then had a temporary monopoly,

“in seeking a maximum degree of security, Russian policy will be aggressive by all means short of war.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “In brief,” the JIC warned

“although the intention may be defensive, the tactics will be offensive, and the danger always exists that Russian leaders may misjudge how far they can go without provoking war with America or ourselves.”

That was in 1946. Here we are, many decades later, but one can see resonances and the relevance of that analysis to the situation that we face today.

We have had two excellent speeches from Labour Back Benchers—I am only sorry that there are not more Opposition Members here, although I am hopeful that, if there were, they would have been largely singing from the same song sheet. However, it is one thing for us all to agree on a bipartisan basis on the analysis of what is wrong and quite another for us to be able to take steps to ensure the safety of the west, which seems to be imperilled rather more than at any time I can think of since at least the 1980s, when there was a huge movement to try and disarm the west of nuclear weapons unilaterally. What are we going to do, what steps are we going to take, and have we got confidence in the leadership of the western world to stand up for the values that seem to be common to all participants so far in this debate?

We have heard a masterly summary of the way in which Russia has been issuing ultimata to the west that are truly extraordinary. I must make a slight disclaimer at this point and say that I am speaking entirely in my capacity as a former Chairman of the Defence Committee, and certainly not as the current Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Nothing that I say in this debate is predicated on anything that I have read, heard or discussed in that more recent capacity.

What I am about to say is the same message that so many of us have been trying to put forward for many years, which is that there is no real defence for Europe without the involvement of the United States. I was very interested to hear the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) about the fact that people should not denigrate the cold war. The cold war was a strategic success for democracy. There were two alternatives to the cold war: one was surrender and the other was nuclear war, so of those three, I think I know which was the preferential outcome. I also agree with the earlier observation that all the talk about grey zone warfare, and all the rest of it, is a sign that we are already involved in a cold war. It is a good thing, if we are faced by adversaries, to confront them, to stand up to them, and hopefully to prevent that from escalating into an open war: a hot war; all-out conflict.

How best can we do that? Well, it worked rather well from the mid-1940s until the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in 1991. It was a mixture of two concepts: deterrence and containment. Deterrence involved two main elements: the involvement of the US, as I said, in European security, and the fact that there was a nuclear umbrella that might not deter all forms of aggression but could certainly protect us from nuclear blackmail. The point about containment is that, if you are not going to go to war with your adversary but you want to stop him taking you over and destroying your way of life, then you have to be prepared to hold him in check for decades on end. What a pity that somebody did not explain this recently to President Biden, who kept talking about “forever wars”. Are the Americans involved in a forever war in South Korea? Should they withdraw their limited military presence from South Korea? What do we think would happen then?

[John Spellar]

Surely that is exactly the wrong analogy. In Korea there is a stalemate and there are two societies. That is very different from fighting a forever guerrilla war in unfavourable territory. It is more about President Biden’s predecessor, who gave everything away to the Taliban in the same way that he encouraged Putin.

[Dr Lewis]

All analogies are risky and no analogies are perfect, but in one sense my analogy stands up: if North Korea now knew that America would not be prepared to go on indefinitely defending South Korea, does one honestly think that South Korea would have much of a future in the face of the regime that it faces across that parallel? Of course it would not.

I am not being partisan about this, because I believe that we are speaking on the very anniversary of ex-President Trump’s disgraceful behaviour in relation to the riots and the invasion of the Capitol, but I am very concerned that we are now faced with the prospect of someone who is manifestly not up to the job of taking on a ruthless, villainous gangster like Vladimir Putin and is going in to negotiate with him on the basis of an ultimatum put forward by Putin that effectively states that the NATO alliance has a take-it-or-leave-it offer: either it withdraws all its troops from the territory of any country that has joined NATO since the end of the cold war or it faces the prospect of military action in Europe. I believe that the great American people and the great American political system depend on more than any individual in the top job, but all I can say is that, if there are wise strategists around President Biden, they had better brief him a lot better, a lot more quickly and in a lot more depth than they did in the run-up to the disastrous unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan.