Tag: Tobias Ellwood

The speech made by Tobias Ellwood, the Chair of the Defence Committee and Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, in the House of Commons on 16 January 2023.

This conflict will not end any time soon. Putin is moving his country to a war footing as he prepares for a spring offensive. Tactically speaking, it is very welcome that we are finally seeing some serious, NATO-standard tracked hardware gifted to Ukraine. It is another example of the UK leading and ever pushing the envelope of international support for Ukraine.

As other nations follow our lead, maintaining so many NATO variants of vehicles and equipment—tanks, armoured personnel carriers and artillery pieces—will not be practical in the long term. Will the UK consider leading again by establishing a western-funded, Ukrainian-operated weapons factory and assembly line in eastern Poland so that Ukraine can become self-sufficient in procuring and replenishing the military kit and munitions it needs for its long-term security, without fear of the facility being targeted by Russia?

Mr Wallace

My right hon. Friend’s suggestion is correct. He is right to say that, unless there is a supply chain or, indeed, a sustainability package behind all this gifting, these vehicles and artillery pieces will become junk on the battlefield when they run out or wear out, so it is important that we think in that way. That is why we will be putting in some recovery vehicles with the Challenger 2 donations. There is a lot of thought going on right now about the sustainability of supply chains, which ties into the international fund, as I am looking for intelligent application of the fund to stimulate just that.

Ukraine has shown itself to be incredibly successful either at reverse-engineering what it captures from Russia or at designing and developing its own equipment. It recently opened a production line for 155 mm or 152 mm shells, and it is now manufacturing within the country. We will get to where my right hon. Friend wants to be by using the international fund or Kindred to fund supply chains over the border. If Ukraine approaches us with ideas for transferring intellectual property so that we can make equipment for Ukraine, or so that Ukraine can make the equipment here or anywhere else, I would be very open to doing that.

The speech made by Tobias Ellwood, the Independent MP for Bournemouth East, in the House of Commons on 22 September 2022.

I also pay tribute to our armed forces, and their contribution to the incredible events that we saw play out on television over the past few days. It was no easy feat, and we can salute all our armed forces, but particularly those pallbearers who did such a magnificent job. I believe that a worthy way to immortalise Queen Elizabeth and what she did for our country as our longest-serving monarch would be to rename one of our bank holidays to Elizabeth day. That debate is for another day, but I hope we can return to it.

It is an honour to follow the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson). He and I did not see eye to eye on everything, but in the case of Ukraine, I hope he recognises that I have always supported what he has done, and indeed, the nation can be proud of it. As I have seen on all my visits to Ukraine, the work Britain has done in stepping forward, more so than many other NATO nations, is recognised. Thanks are due to my right hon. Friend for leading that charge.

I want to step back from what is happening in Ukraine for a second and look at the bigger picture. We must ask ourselves a fundamental question, one that I pose on a regular basis: is our world likely to become more or less dangerous over the next few years? I think the answer is very clear: it is the former. This is not just about Ukraine, but a worrying growth in authoritarianism versus democracy across the globe, and the emergence of a new alliance—one that is not so obvious yet—between Russia and China. They share a mutual disdain for not only our international rules-based order, but for the west and the United States in particular. They are challenging the status quo that we have enjoyed since the end of the cold war. We have enjoyed that relative peace for three decades, but we have become complacent in nurturing our democratic values, and authoritarian states are becoming bolder and more assertive in promoting their own agenda. Consequently, our world is becoming more siloed and more protectionist, and we have become more risk averse.

Our actions now—what we do and how we handle Ukraine, given that the conflict is now moving into a darker chapter—will determine how the next decade plays out. China is watching our response carefully, given that it has its sights on Taiwan. Seven months on from Putin’s unprovoked invasion, the west is, I think, starting to wake up to the reality that state-on-state aggression is back, but our institutions built to constrain rogue actors are vulnerable, and new technology has given autocrats new forms of leverage. The art of conflict itself is consequently changing, with not just cyber-attacks, as mentioned already, but economic attacks, including the unprecedented use of international sanctions. All those things have global consequences for the way we do business.

Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)

Do we therefore need to look again at what constitutes going to war, not least because we can now destroy other societies without a single bullet being fired—through the use of cyber, for instance?

Mr Ellwood

This is moving into the area of Clausewitz and what exactly war is—whether it is simply the military on the battlefield, or the politics and the economics. We have not really woken up to that, but Putin is using politics and economics to harm the rest of Europe with oil and gas, as well as grain. There is an irony here: we will have a debate in this place tomorrow, as we absolutely should, about supporting people through the cost of energy crisis we are facing here, but many of our problems are actually in Europe. Sorting those out would be a huge step towards dealing with some of the local problems we are facing.

We need to work more collectively and be less risk averse. We get spooked by some of the rhetoric that comes from Putin, and he has done it again by wanting to go down this avenue of using nuclear weapons. As has been touched on before, Russian doctrine includes the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and we need to understand that doctrine. The Minister refused to answer the question of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith)—others are saying, “Quite right.”

We need clarity on what our doctrine is because it needs to be confirmed with our allies as well. We could cross a threshold here and we would not necessarily know what to do. I am afraid that Putin has taken advantage of our risk-averseness and of the fact that we have put red lines in, such as over chemical weapons in Syria, and then not responded. People can shake their heads as much as they like. This is an awkward conversation that needs to be had as to what Britain, NATO and the United States will do if a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon is used in the Donbas region. I pose that as a question. We can take it behind the scenes and not discuss it, and then it will actually happen and we will look at each other and say, “What do we actually do?”

Russia needs to know that we are willing to stand up to what Putin is doing, otherwise he will continue, as will other adversaries, to take advantage of our collective weakness. We have done well to provide the weapons systems to Ukraine to advance it in what it is doing. We now need to take it further and leverage that ability to push forward, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip said, to make sure that we can conclude what goes on in Ukraine. If we do not put out this fire in Ukraine, it will spread elsewhere.