Ukraine
Debate between Jonathan Djanogly and Bob Stewart
Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)
Ukraine is Europe and Europe is Ukraine. I am under no illusion that the incredibly brave defence and sacrifices being made by the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression and barbarism is nothing less than a sacrifice on our behalf. While Ukrainian sacrifice is about defence of their land and their homes, for us their sacrifice is not about territory; it is a sacrifice being made by Ukrainians in defence of our democratic values, our peaceful existence, our western cultures and the post war non-violent settlement that we have enjoyed for so long and come to take for granted. All those things are now challenged by Russia’s totally unsupportable actions.
To lay the blame at the door of an unhinged Russian President or his criminal gang is easy, but it is not adequate. The causes of this disaster are long in the making and are painful for us in the west, because they show up weaknesses in our own political systems. In retrospect, we in the free west massively misunderstood the nature and implications of the demise of the Soviet empire. We assumed that that empire and its power elites would somehow disappear—that they would jump to western values, markets and regulation, and that they would demilitarise. We relaxed and took down our guard. We demilitarised, based on some vacant concept of the peace dividend and the ultimate victory of liberal democracy, and we hoped, with little justification, that Russia would become just like us. Most people actually welcomed President Putin, who in the early days made a play against corruption—that is, until the huge scale of his own corruption was realised. Then the west adopted an apologist attitude. Little was made of Putin’s viciousness in Chechnya, perhaps because that suited the western narrative at the time. The invasion of Georgia in 2008 went largely unnoticed in the west, even though it established a method of interference, fake causation and brutal attack that we have now seen repeatedly used by Russia in Crimea and in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk.
For those of us who have closely followed these events over the past decade, it has been a very frustrating period. Even when Russia attacked people in this jurisdiction, indeed using radioactive and nerve agent weapons, we reacted only in the most measured of ways, and yet the signs and the patterns—the lack of care for our values, the irrationality, the barbarism and the cynical geopolitical manipulation tactics—were always there. If there is one thing that comes out of this before others, it is that we must view our relationship with Russia on the basis of what it is, not what we would want it to be. Personally, I am horrified and disgusted by Russia—but I am not surprised.
We must recognise that Russia is quite content not only to use force but also to start using it on a much lower provocation level than us. So yes, even if we do not directly fight Russia, we must continue to provide the Ukrainians with all the military assistance they need. If they also need missiles to defend against planes, they should get them. If they need more anti-tank weapons, they should get them. If we need also to institute an urgent review of what military staff and equipment we and NATO will need in the event of Russian aggression continuing in the way it has been doing, we must do it. There must be no more weakness and no more ignoring threats.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
I thank my very good friend for allowing me to intervene. The real problem the military have now is that the anti-aircraft missiles cannot go high enough, so they really need MiG-29s. There are pilots there that can fly them, and there are MiG-29s within the NATO alliance; we have seen the Polish ones. Let us do all we can to try to give them MiG-29s so that they can go up and get the aircraft that are beyond the reach of anti-aircraft missiles.
Mr Djanogly
My right hon. Friend makes a great intervention. I absolutely agree that we should be doing everything we can to assist the Poles to get those planes to our friends in Ukraine.
If Russia is not prepared to live by our western rules and actually uses them against us, then we must remove it from our economic system. It has become clear that the west acting collectively has the ability to send Russia back to the economic dark ages and a barter society, if we have the political will to do that. Recent sanctions rounds and implicit western unity in this regard, not least the banning of Russian banks from the SWIFT system, have been heartening and often indeed led by our Government.
The further list of sanctions today, taking numbers, as the Minister said, to over 1,000 individuals, is welcome and impressive. Having said that, I do feel that if we had cracked down on Russian intransigence after its invasion of Georgia—which, by the way, Russia still partly occupies—we would have stopped much later pain in the west.