27
Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy
Oral evidence: Deterrence in an age of Russian aggression, HC 338
Monday 15 June 2026
4.30 pm
Members present: Matt Western (The Chair); Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom; Lord Boateng; Liam Byrne; Bill Esterson; Lord Godson; Lord Hutton of Furness; Lord Jack of Courance; Baroness Kidron; Edward Morello; Lord Sedwill; Andy Slaughter; Lord Tunnicliffe; Baroness Tyler of Enfield; Lord Watts; Sir Gavin Williamson.
Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 - 14
Witnesses
John Foreman CBE, former defence attaché to Moscow and Kyiv; Professor Bettina Renz, Professor of International Security, University of Nottingham; Andrei Soldatov, investigative journalist and co-founder, Agentura.ru; Professor Samuel Greene, Professor of Russian Politics, King’s College London.
John Foreman, Professor Bettina Renz, Andrei Soldatov and Professor Samuel Greene.
Q1 The Chair: Today we are holding our first session on deterrence in an age of Russian aggression. Can I ask the witnesses to introduce themselves?
Andrei Soldatov: I am a Russian investigative journalist. I have been writing about Russian intelligence and security services since 1999, and I have been living here in London since 2020.
John Foreman: Good afternoon. I was previously the British defence attaché in Moscow from 2019 to 2022. I was also the attaché in Kyiv from 2008 to 2011. Since I left the Navy, I am now an independent consultant and an associate fellow with Chatham House.
Professor Bettina Renz: I am a professor of international security at the University of Nottingham. I have been studying and researching the Russian military and politics for about the last 20 years.
Professor Samuel Greene: I am professor of Russian politics at King’s College London. My specialisation is on Russian politics and the link between domestic politics and foreign policy. I lived and worked in Moscow for about 13 years before I moved to London in 2012 to create the Russia Institute at King’s, which I then ran for about 10 years.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Perhaps I could start with trying to understand why Russia does not like us. What is it about the UK and our role in, say, European intelligence that positions us in a way that we are seen as a threat or a real target for so much of its activity?
John Foreman: I wrote a thing for the Army last year about how the Russians regard us. I thought that, if you look back over our long history of diplomatic relations, starting in the 16th century, our relationship has always been tricky. It is very difficult and transactional, not one of friendliness. We have periods of alliance when our interests align, but we also have periods when relations are broken. I think we have broken relations four times.
We were talking outside about how this history of a difficult relationship has translated and accelerated in the current period, especially under Putin. You hear these talks about us as now the implacable foe, the ideological enemy of Russia behind the Ukrainian resistance and responsible for terrorist outrages, for example, inside Russia, all of which are false. It plays this outsized role in the Russian imagination and especially in the security services.
Andrei Soldatov: This relationship is extremely emotional for the Russian intelligence and security services. In a way, the identity of the Russian intelligence agencies was built on the basis of fighting British intelligence. It is not a big secret that spy chiefs in Moscow believe that the UK was the only country that tried to undermine and change the political regime in Soviet Russia after the revolution.
Also, it has been very emotional because the Russian intelligence services believe they scored the biggest successes against British intelligence. That is why the Cambridge five is a founding myth of Russian intelligence. At some point when the SVR—Russian foreign intelligence—was talking about choosing a symbol for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the agency, it came up with several candidates and ended up with Kim Philby. It believes that Kim Philby embodied all the qualities it needed to teach to Russian spies. We all understand that it is a bit irrational, because you cannot make a Russian into Kim Philby, but that is how they see this kind of fighting.
Of course, culture played a huge role. John le Carré has been extremely powerful and influential. He has been probably the most cited writer of spy novels by Russian spies, starting in the 1960s. Even Naryshkin, the present chief of the SVR, has cited John le Carré. I was there last time several years ago. Five years ago, if you walked into the internal museum of the FSB, the entire hall was devoted to fighting with British intelligence immediately after the Second World War and how British intelligence tried to undermine the Soviet regime in the Baltics and in Ukraine.
The Chair: Am I right in summing up by saying that there is a disproportionate—I say disproportionate relative to the size of the UK—attribution of importance to the UK in intelligence services? There is a mythical status of how good we might be, but also how influential the United Kingdom is.
John Foreman: It is both for the military and security services, and throughout the state. There is this duality in the Russian imagination about the British. On the one side, we are past it, over the hill and a former great power living on past glories. On the other, we are an implacable, resourceful, cunning foe, destined to bring down the Russian state, whether that is in the foreign ministry, where we see how Britain is referred to in the foreign policy concept, or how we appear in the military doctrine and in military history—they have respect for our soldiers, but also like to crow about some of the difficulties we are going through—and into the security services.
Q2 The Chair: Professor Renz, perhaps I could ask you to what extent this view of the United Kingdom is changing or has changed since the United States brought out its own national security strategy document, which suggests a different dynamic, if we can put it like that, between the US and Europe and between the US and the UK. How might that manifest itself were there to be a ceasefire in Ukraine?
Professor Bettina Renz: It is true that the Russian view on the UK was until very recently, or still is, very much connected to the UK relationship with the US and the special relationship. Recent developments, especially since 2022, have made it more difficult for Russia to understand the UK. It has introduced quite a lot of ambiguity. On the one hand, Russia sees it as a strategic vulnerability that before, or until fairly recently, UK security and defence was so closely linked to the United States and now there seem to be some issues when it comes to the special relationship, or it is under threat in certain ways.
At the same time, Russia continues looking at the UK as special in this respect, where the UK is isolated from Europe. It sees that as a vulnerability. At the same time, it sees the UK as still having an influence over the United States and even, as was discussed in the Russian media by some commentators, trying to pull Trump away from Russia or trying to influence here, especially with the relationship of support for Ukraine.
It is an ambiguous view. Russia sees vulnerabilities, but also strengths at the same time. When it comes to Russia’s view of the UK, yes, it singles out the UK. Some people have said it looks at the UK as a new enemy number one, especially since it is trying to move closer to the US. At the same time, the UK is still looked at through the framework of the broader West and the western unity that Russia is trying to disrupt in the long term.
The Chair: Professor Greene, when we talk about Russia we think about Putin and the apparatus of government around Putin. In most other nations, you think about the wider society, the economic influence and the corporational influence, if you like. What is the situation with Russia and the attitude of the oligarchs, either in-country or senior business leaders who may have left Russia, and other members of what you might describe as the Russian elite? What is their view of the UK?
Professor Samuel Greene: It is complicated. It is difficult for them to have a view that is too different from what has been described already by Andrei. In particular, this is a political establishment that orients itself towards conformity and consensus, at least performatively, and yet the Russian establishment—the Russian elite if you like—has historically had a great deal of integration with the United Kingdom, particularly with London, in terms of investment markets, personal lives and property markets. That has created some of the relationship that we have seen and that my colleagues have talked about, in that there is a certain anxiety on the part of the regime and the security services, which do not want that relationship to turn into one of dependency that could create some leverage from the UK over Russia, or over people who matter in Russia.
As we have seen in the last four and a half years since the advent of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, whatever depth of integration people have had they have by and large lost as a result of sanctions. The war has not moved them to a position where they feel like they have to challenge the foreign policy being pursued by the regime. We have seen that a number of them feel that they have in fact been hard done by, by the United Kingdom, after years or decades of significant amounts of investment. A certain amount of resentment has accrued over the last several years as well.
The Chair: Could I ask for some brief remarks from all of you? In any international relationship there can be misunderstandings; there can be a lot of history, as you alluded to, Andrei. Do we misunderstand them? Do they misunderstand us? We think back to the early 2000s and the first years of Putin. He was embraced by the major economies, thinking that this was a fresh start and a new economic order, if you like, and that we could work with him. That persisted for however many years, until the mid-2010s, I guess. Did we get that wholly wrong?
Andrei Soldatov: There were, and probably are, some misunderstandings. I can talk about the Russian side, as well as from the British side. Apparently not everyone here understands that Russian intelligence and security services are extremely important for the Russian national identity, because that is where you can find some proof that Russia is still a superpower. When Russia feels defeated on some other things, even if we are talking about spies caught in the United States, for instance, in 2010, it is still possible for the Kremlin to make it look like a sign to the Russian population: “Actually, we can get back. We can get our people back to the United States. We can get our people back to the UK. This is a sign that we are still a superpower”. It is accepted by lots of people in Moscow and Russia because it is something to do with national pride.
The other thing that probably is misunderstood is that, right now, for Russian intelligence agencies, the war we have in Ukraine is an existential war. Because they tend to think historically and in historical terms, they immediately make this comparison with what happened just before the Soviet Union collapsed, when Gorbachev stopped the war in Afghanistan. What happened afterwards was humiliation of the Russian army, humiliation of the KGB, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disruption of the agencies. They see the end of the war in these kinds of terms, so they do not want to stop. Given how disproportionate their role is in Russian society, it is a huge factor that is probably misunderstood.
John Foreman: We underestimated the damage done to Russia in 1991 as a result of 70 or 80 years of communism. We were overoptimistic that Russia could emerge from that experience to become a Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium or UK. We tried a mirror image. We tried to appeal to reason, especially as the relationship was deteriorating steadily: “Why would you do that? If only we worked together in the G8, we could work together for mutual benefit”. That was misguided.
Finally, ahead of the war, we misunderstood Putin’s goals, risk appetite and risk-reward calculus. We have a poor understanding of Russian threat perceptions and their perspectives, Putin’s intent, and that of the elite, which Sam talked about.
Professor Samuel Greene: I have two things very briefly. One is that we misunderstood Russian willingness to act, and to act decisively and militarily, despite its disadvantages. We interpreted its disadvantages to mean that action of the kind that we saw in Ukraine in 2014 and then in 2022 would be so ill advised as to be impossible. We were wrong about its calculations, although we were not wrong about its disadvantages.
We were also wrong throughout the longer period that you were talking about from 2000 onwards, not to the extent that 2022 was inevitable. I do not think that it was, at any point early on in Putin’s time, inevitable. As the time of Putin’s regime wore on and it became more autocratic, we tended, in the policy community, to listen to business and investment interests and not to listen as much to Russian opposition politicians and Russian civil society, which were saying that the openness of British institutions, and European institutions more broadly, to Russian kleptocratic capital was insulating the Russian regime from democratic pressures, making it less accountable and making conflict more likely down the road.
Q3 Lord Sedwill: I would like to pursue this point you have made about the iconic position of the security and intelligence services in the Russian state. I would be interested in views from all of you. Have they become more aggressive, militarised and risk taking, and, if so, why?
Andrei Soldatov: That process started a few years before the war in Ukraine, for several reasons. One was that, at the time, we had, as President, Dmitry Medvedev, and he had a civilian Minister of Defence, Serdyukov, who wanted to downgrade Russian military intelligence, and he succeeded. When Putin came back to power, he brought with him Sergei Shoigu as the new Minister of Defence.
Shoigu wanted to upscale military intelligence significantly and very quickly. The speed is significant here, because he understood immediately that you cannot train new spies sufficiently quickly. You need to find them somewhere. Quite naturally in Russian bureaucracy, the general staff decided that it would find new people in the military inside the departments that had some understanding of secret operations. That was the Russian special forces. That was quite natural for Russian bureaucracy, also because Russian special forces—spetsnaz—have always been under the control or supervision of the Russian military intelligence.
General staff brought lots of people from spetsnaz—from special forces—into the Russian military intelligence. These guys brought with them a completely different kind of mentality. We all understand that special forces do not really understand the difference between times of peace and war. They do not really care about being exposed. They want to get things done. The thing is that that was a very good moment for this kind of transition, because that was 2014, when the war in Ukraine had just started. It was a playground for special operations for the Russian military intelligence. Also, it was the time of Syria.
There was another reason, which is extremely important right now. It was a time when the West adopted a new strategy on how to deter Russian intelligence agencies. That was called naming and shaming. The idea was that, if you expose Russian spies in public, that would help to at least slow down their operations. That worked for probably one or two years. The Russian response was, “We can train our people to be a bit more discreet and professional, but it is costly and time-consuming, or you can find people who do not really care about being exposed”. That is exactly what they did. They recruited lots of people from special forces. Because it was so successful—and we all remember what happened in Salisbury—it became a thing not only for Russian military intelligence, but also for other agencies.
Now we have the same process inside of the Russian SVR—it is getting very militarised—and the FSB. They now recruit lots of people who are veterans of the war in Ukraine, so naturally they are getting more and more people with this kind of mentality.
John Foreman: I see the shift to become more aggressive in line with the shift of the whole state to become more aggressive towards what it perceives as its opponents in the wake of Putin’s speeches in 2008 and especially when he came back to power, in the wake of the Bolotnaya riots and protests. It was perceived that the regime, or his regime and his rule, was under threat from the outside, and that there was a need to push back against that, because of this deep sense of insecurity in the past.
I also think that there is a degree of internal competition between the various services. I do not think you should see it as a homogenous mass. You have the SVR, the FSB and the GRU competing amongst each other for the ear of the boss and for the money. It is not so much top down as bottom up to say, “Hey, we can do this. They can’t do that. Give us the money”. You get that cycle, as we say, of risk taking and appetite, as we saw in Afghanistan, perhaps, on bounties, in Salisbury, and indeed in Europe in FSB assassinations.
Professor Bettina Renz: I can add two points to that. It is important to bear in mind that, in general, in Russia, there is less of a distinction made between military and security services. They speak in general of the four structures of power. We saw that in the beginning, so after 2000 or 2002, some security services or intelligence services were disbanded. New ones were created. There are a lot of people just moving from one to the other. That is important to bear in mind. A lot of people who wear uniform in Russia are not actually from the armed forces as we know them.
Yes, they have become obviously more aggressive and militarised. I think that this has to do with the Russian understanding of deterrence, which is quite different from how we understand it in the West. It is much more a type of coercion or cross-domain coercion, as some analysts have called it, where there are active and reactive measures used in peace and wartime that include military and non-military instruments, such as disinformation, sabotage and so on. There is much less of a distinction to be made here. That has all been stepped up increasingly since Putin, or the Russian regime, has felt the need to stand up to or confront the West with ever more force.
Lord Sedwill: I have one further point to follow on from that. Given this competitive nature, the incentive to be aggressive and the fact they have these people who are inherently less careful about their identity and being revealed, what does that mean for our doctrines of defence and deterrence against their activities?
John Foreman: Following on from Bettina’s point, because the Russians have a very different model or system of deterrence—all measures all the time, peace, crisis, conflicts—sometimes we here confuse deterrence with the deterrent, i.e. the bomb. We do not have a similar sort of nuanced model or system, where we understand the various tools we can use at various stages to incentivise or disincentivise the Russians from doing things. That lack of agreed models or frameworks allows the Russians to manipulate us and gain advantage. In some ways, we could become a little more Russian.
Somebody asked me recently, “When was the last time we had a Prime Minister-led strategic deterrence exercise with Ministers and not officials?” I am told that it is not within recent memory. We do not understand the tools to gain the effects we want to achieve, and we do not practise or exercise it. There is nothing mentioned in the national security strategy. It talks only about resilience and resilience exercises. We could understand the Russians better and then perhaps, understanding what they want, put our tools across agency and whole government to contain them.
Lord Sedwill: To pursue that, one point this committee has made in a different inquiry about undersea cables is that attribution is only the first step in any kind of effective response in terms of the flexible deterrence you just described. Are we right about that? What would you recommend, whether it is dealing with the security services or dealing with other threats of that kind, that ought to be in the toolbox?
John Foreman: I am a great fan of the long telegram by George Kennan and what he set out about how to tackle the Soviet and then the Russian threat. He said, and I always remember, that Russia respects the logic of force, not the logic of reason. I do not think that calling out Russian bad behaviour really goes anywhere.
For example, if we look at undersea cables or the shadow fleet, the Russians pay much more attention to doing things than spending six months talking about doing things. It is not just about calling out. It is about investing in the capabilities to understand what they are up to and, if necessary, confront them in crisis. I do not think that we have really bottomed that out. We like to be declaratory, but we have to follow up our words with deeds and investment to actually have the capabilities in place.
Q4 Lord Tunnicliffe: In preparing for this session, our team produced some notes and I was shocked to see the extent of apparent devolution in Russia of military decision-making. Could you spell out what the system is? I naively thought that any decision that might have serious retaliatory consequences would be made by Putin, because that is the television image. I am obviously somewhat naive. Tell me how they work and how they make their decisions.
Professor Bettina Renz: It is not at all naive. The problem is that this is very difficult for us to assess. As we saw when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine unfolded, there were an awful lot of things that we got wrong or expected wrong. I guess that the conclusion was that what we thought was Russian doctrine and how decisions would be made was not, in reality, like that. We need to be very careful not to transpose our own understanding of how defence policy is made or decisions are made on to Russia.
It is very clear that it is a very weakly institutionalised state. It has all the trappings of state of committees, the Parliament, a defence ministry and so on, but, when it comes to decision-making, it is very clear—I think everybody agrees—that these decisions were made by a small group of advisers around President Putin. There are even indications or reports—I do not have direct insight into that—that the input of even quite high-ranking military was not sought to a sufficient degree about what might work, what might be a good approach and so on. That explains some of the problems that Russia encountered that people thought it would not encounter. It is very much a black box and we always need to bear that in mind.
Some people might have access to information that, as just a regular academic, we do not have. Very often, assumptions about what works in Russia and who makes the decisions are interpretations. They are always open to interpretation pressure and it is very important to think through, “What if we are wrong? What could be alternative ways of thinking about that?” It is a very difficult thing to pin down, but it is very clear that seniority or having a certain position, even a state official position, does not guarantee that that person would make the same kind of decision they would make in the UK or in any other western country.
John Foreman: There are two case studies: the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin said after the invasion of Crimea and annexation something like, “There were five guys in the room and we made the decision, ‘Let’s go for it’”. It is not the people you would expect. It is not the Security Council, national security adviser or Secretary of Defence. It is people he knew at school, his business partners or people he has perhaps familial ties to.
You have this formal state, which we would understand, so the Ministry of Defence, general staff, Security Council, presidential Administration and Putin, and this informal state, which is, as Bettina said, extremely hard to penetrate. In the lead-up to 2022, we saw the same informal state exert itself. Who was making decisions to invade? It was Putin, in principle, probably two years beforehand, advised by people outside the system, leading up to, in 2022, the military being suborned to the FSB in particular and treating the invasion of Ukraine as a domestic pacification operation, not an invasion of a foreign country, which led them down all sorts of bad planning routes and to the disaster of the invasion, if that makes sense.
Lord Tunnicliffe: Can I ask you a specific question? Who, other than Putin, would decide to use a tactical nuclear weapon?
John Foreman: It is controlled by the 12th directorate inside the general staff, which is under direct presidential control through the presidential Administration to Putin. It is one thing we have seen. Control of nuclear weapons has been within norms of the last period beforehand. You see a lot of stories about nuclear weapons signalling, but the actual control of the hardware is firmly kept under a special directorate inside the general staff, precisely for that reason. It is for control and escalation purposes—signalling—but also because they do not want any unintended consequences of escalation themselves.
Q5 Lord Godson: Thank you for the testimony. I am checking in on several things. First, one of you used the term that we are the ideological enemy now. Of course, there was the term during the Cold War. The KGB used the words “main enemy” about the United States. I understand what we are doing to frustrate them in the hard power areas in national security, but what is the nature of us as the ideological enemy, particularly post our departure from the European Union?
Secondly, with a minor amateur interest in le Carré, what is their latest thinking on why John le Carré is relevant? What does it indicate about British vulnerabilities, British culture and the British mindset?
Finally, you talk about how there is a tendency on their side to crow about our difficulties. What currently is the aspect that most attracts their attention, for example break-up of the United Kingdom or activities previously of Sputnik in Scotland? Weaponisation of migration might be another thing. Particularly, do they see opportunities for creation of a MAGA-style bridgehead to undermine the British consensus on the right, as far as Russia is concerned.
Andrei Soldatov: We need to understand that, when we talk about the UK being an ideological enemy, there are several levels to that. One is that Russian intelligence agencies believe that British intelligence is much more aggressive and adventurous than the European, or even the American, intelligence agencies. For instance, there is a notion that most of the operations of sabotage conducted or planned by the Ukrainians in Russia were actually planned by the Brits. That is why they feel absolutely justified in devising new plans to carry out sabotage attacks here in the UK, because they believe they are on the defensive.
The interesting thing about John le Carré is that they have been very practical when thinking and talking about John le Carré. They are always trying to find a good use for him. They started in the 1960s, using his book A Small Town in Germany, but trying to say, “We told you that: that the Brits are using Nazi criminals to develop weapons of mass destruction”. On top of that, they produced a movie, which became very popular in the Soviet Union.
In the 1990s and 2000s they changed this attitude and started exploiting John le Carré as a means to say, “Actually there is no difference between us. The best guy in the West, who knows everything about this world, has said that there is no difference between the West and the East. There is moral equality between us. We are professionals, they are professionals, so why treat us differently?” That has been their point ever since. I would say that maybe now it is changing again. A former attaché in the Soviet embassy in the UK, Mikhail Lyubimov, who knew John le Carré, is now writing articles and programming media saying, “John le Carré told me that the West treated the East and the Soviet Union completely unfairly and we need to change that”.
Professor Samuel Greene: There are two parts to your question, leaving apart the John le Carré issues, on which I defer to Andrei. One has to do with the nature of ideological enmity. For all of its ideological trappings, I do not see the Kremlin in its current iteration as a particularly ideological regime. This is not the Soviet Union. It uses ideology for political purposes, domestically and internationally; it does not feel bound by it. I do not see that as the structural element in the relationship with the United Kingdom.
There are two elements that drive the focus, though. One is the presence of dissidents. The UK has had a consistent policy of supporting or making itself available as a haven for Russian democratic opposition, democratic civil society and independent media, and consistently supporting those sorts of organisations around the world. That is seen as a direct threat, and one that I think the Kremlin sees in largely ideological terms.
Predictability also matters. Moscow has a sense of how it expects Britain to respond in reaction to whatever it is that the Russians do. Broadly speaking, it can be relied on to rise to the occasion rhetorically and not to do too much beyond that that might cause material consequence to Moscow. That makes it an attractive target.
In terms of vulnerabilities, there are two alongside the ones that you mentioned. One is a particular structural vulnerability that has to do with fragile relationships with allies, so trying to find a new position or a new structure of the relationship with Europe post Brexit. Where Britain had been, in essence, the geopolitical voice inside the European Union, it is now left somewhat adrift, from Moscow’s perspective. That is an opportunity for leverage, as well, of course, as the breakdown in the relationship between London and Washington. It makes Britain look like a particularly vulnerable target.
There is a certain permeability to messaging. There is an ability to take the infrastructure that was built initially for intervention in the United States and turn it to messaging intervention in the United Kingdom. As well, a media system that takes freedom of speech very seriously and so tries not to erect barriers to speech, wherever that speech may be coming from, means that, whether it is the Kremlin, Elon Musk or whoever, it is an environment that can be played in, again with predictably negligible consequences.
Professor Bettina Renz: This follows on from what Sam has been saying. Russia has, for a long time, talked about western hypocrisy and double standards, particularly when it comes to the UK for some reason. This is something it actually believes: that the norms we stand for, the ideas and the rules-based international order are really just a cover for power projection or other interests. This is something that it finds difficult to deal with now, seeing that the UK has left the EU, for example, but still has been able to galvanise support for Ukraine in Europe and is still very much a part of Europe and leading, in fact, in that sense. It is also working closer with France and Germany on certain defence issues.
It is difficult for Russia to swallow that we actually believe in those things. This is again a matter of misunderstanding and of Russia not being able to understand how policy is made in the West and that the public is also very supportive, for example, of support for Ukraine. When I look at the Russian media, I always see how they jump with glee on any sort of critical article that is published in the British press, for example, about weaknesses in government and Parliament, in the military, and so on. They do not understand that this is part of freedom of information and exchange. They then make more of that than it actually is.
When we think about deterrence, and you mentioned containment earlier, that also had a very strong ideological element. As much as we think about how to deter Russia and the different ways Russia is aggressive, we always need to bear in mind that part of what we are defending is the rules-based, law-based international order and democracy. This is something that Russia really does not like.
John Foreman: Putinism is a malignant tumour on the body politic. I do not think it creates the problems that we have. It exploits them and then metastasises them. It can easily shift focus depending on what the issue is. You see that whether it is on support to Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic solidarity, European unity, democracy, nationalism, economic opportunity or identity politics. It seeks to exploit those in order to weaken us. Part of its overall strategy is to weaken its opponents before it gets into any conflict.
Q6 Sir Gavin Williamson: It is very interesting to hear what you are saying about the boldness that has developed within the Russian security services. You also touched upon the fact that our responses—let us say attribution or monitoring—are almost calibrated for a world that was previous to this. If you are going to dial that response up, how do you see that response looking? What do we need to do and what will be the consequences of that?
Andrei Soldatov: The first thing to do is to forget and stop comparing what we have now with the Cold War. It is absolutely different. The lessons that were drawn from the Cold War are not applicable here. For instance, the KGB and other Soviet intelligence agencies always had a sabotage option at their disposal in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but they never activated it, because they believed that this option was only for the time of a really big hot war in Europe. Now they use it all the time. We are in uncharted territory, because there are no lessons to draw from the past.
We all talk here about how difficult it is to understand who is in charge of which part of the Russian security and intelligence community. Again, it goes against the idea we had of the Soviet Union by the end of the Cold War, when everything was very well established. That is why the best comparison that we have is not with the 1980s but with the 1950s, the time immediately after the Second World War, when Stalin decided to use Second World War veterans for very aggressive operations across Europe. He started killing dissidents and people who decided to remain in Europe, and it was a very aggressive campaign.
John Foreman: I know that you are considering the national security strategy. I read it on the way down here. It is packed full of great ideas and things to do. If we follow through on the recommendations or actions in the national security strategy, that would do an awful lot to, first, make the UK and our allies a harder environment to operate in. Secondly, we would strengthen our nuclear deterrence, our conventional deterrence and our deterrence in the unconventional space through intelligence liaison, going off the proxies and weakening the network. It is a bit of both and, unfortunately, we always will be reacting to Russian aggression, because we are in a democracy and a defensive alliance, and we do not want to unnecessarily escalate the situation further.
Sir Gavin Williamson: Something that was mentioned earlier is that Britain talks a good game but does not really follow through. There is a lot of rhetoric, but not necessarily action. Sometimes there is a lot of talk about asymmetric responses in terms of how you are trying to impose a cost in a different area. Do you think in some ways this is trying to be a bit too subtle and we need to be a little bolder in terms of responses to the costs that we impose on Russia for actions that it takes?
Professor Bettina Renz: We need to be clear what we are talking or thinking about, because for some Russian actions an asymmetric response might work. For others, it might not. If you read all the work on Russian shadow warfare, hybrid warfare, grey zone activities and what have you, it includes things from putting disinformation on Facebook or the internet to cutting undersea cables. We need to be clear what we are talking about. Talk of grey zone activities in some of those aspects does not cut it. It is a matter of how you frame it, because some of these are clear military activities. The military is involved. Critical infrastructure is targeted and so on. We need clearer responses there and obviously just calling that out is not good enough.
We saw just yesterday the Royal Marines going on to one of the shadow fleet vessels and arresting the staff. This is direct. It is a clear response and that can be done in those circumstances. When it comes to sabotage activities where it is much more difficult to attribute this, obviously it is not possible to that extent.
Maybe it is also not always the best choice or necessary to react immediately. As we have seen in some other countries, when it comes to disinformation, for example, maybe waiting and developing a clear counternarrative to Russia, exposing what Russia is doing and making the population understand, can be just as effective, although it is not an immediate response. In Bulgaria, for example, people have made the argument that that was a use of reflexive control against Russia. Russian disinformation backfired in a sense, because it galvanised public opinion against Russia.
I completely understand why we talk about grey zone, these broader approaches and hybrid warfare, but I have been critical of that in the past. It is so broad and extensive, and it includes so many different things, that what we can do about it becomes problematic.
As a small point, we need to bear in mind that just a single or a national response will always have limited strategic effect. It will be much more effective if Europe, the West, NATO or individual regional defensive alliances have a clear message and a clear communication strategy towards Russia that is integrated.
Professor Samuel Greene: I might differ very slightly from my colleague. It depends on what we are trying to deter. If what we are trying to deter is an expanded conventional war on the European continent, Ukraine is obviously the focus, and that is a broader conversation that is being had, in which this country is very much engaged, I think productively and in the right direction.
If we are talking about the sort of grey zone activity that Bettina was describing, I am a little more concerned. The concern I have here is not that this is a precursor to conventional invasion of Estonia or a NATO member state, or the UK for that matter, but that the risk is inadvertent escalation. The risk is a repeat of the downing of MH17 on European territory. If a drone being flown by a semi-professional contracted Russian agent in the vicinity of a major European airport collides with a civilian aircraft and several hundred people die on the territory of a NATO member state, that forces a political response, which can lead us in the direction that neither side wants, because the Russian side assumes that this is risk-free activity and cannot escalate.
We have assumed, broadly speaking, that Russia does not want to escalate. That is why it is operating below the threshold of traditional warfare, and yet events can get out of hand, in part because the system that my colleagues have been describing does not impose discipline on the Russian side. It calculates the benefits of this activity. It does not calculate the cost of this activity very well because it assumes that we are so bottlenecked in the process of recognition, attribution and definition—were we attacked, who attacked us and is this an act of war?—that we would fail to operate in a way that then imposes consequence.
If the Russians are not going to impose consequence on themselves, and if we are genuinely concerned about inadvertent escalation, we need to be imposing that consequence on them. That is not necessarily through immediate action and not through responding to everything, because we will sometimes struggle to be confident in exactly what has happened, but making it clear that there is a doctrine—and I agree it needs to be an allied doctrine—that can move more quickly through that action or decision chain and impose material consequences, not on the, frankly expendable, agents who have undertaken this activity, but on Russia’s national interests itself, so that Russia can see how this activity can move above the threshold of warfare and put Russia in a place where it does not want to be.
The point on unity is exactly right. We have seen exactly that what this Government did in boarding the shadow fleet ship the other day and what the Swedes have been doing consistently works, but it works to move those ships into other territories. Sweden’s problem has now become Denmark’s problem. The effective response has to be an allied response. Whether that is NATO or some other configuration is a question for the politicians to figure out, but it needs to be figured out; otherwise we will simply kick this can around the Nordic-Baltic region and the rest of Europe.
John Foreman: Can I go back to your point about communications? In deterrence thinking or theory, deterrence options have to be capable, credible and communicable. We tend to forget that in our enthusiasm to be seen to be tough on the Russians. We have actively reduced the number of channels we have with Russia, whether that is through NATO or nationally. We have expelled the Russian defence attaché. We lost our defence attaché in Moscow. We have both done this tit for tat cycle of expelling diplomats, which does not give us a channel to actually talk in private about serious issues of concern.
Sir Gavin Williamson: There is no safe space.
John Foreman: No. For example, after the invasion the Ministry of Defence summoned the Russian defence attaché to pass clear messages to the Russian side. Also, I went into the Russian MoD to do exactly the same. We made sure that that message was the same, whether it was being passed by the NSA, the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister, so they get it. Back to your point, they do not understand us very well, and we, the British, tend to speak in riddles, not particularly clearly and with understatement, which the Russians do not really understand, because they have no experience, in the elite at the top of government, of actually living and working in the West, or in particular in Britain.
Q7 Lord Boateng: I wonder whether we can move on from the psychology of John le Carré’s impact on Russia’s thinking about us and Ian Fleming’s impact on our thinking about them, and look at the issue of military hardware, the military factors affecting Russian decision-makers’ risk calculus and what sorts of western responses they are more or less concerned about.
Professor Bettina Renz: This is a big question, so I will try to keep it short. What are the Russians most concerned about? One big concern for Russia and one of its main foreign policy objectives is to maintain freedom of action, both domestically and internationally. This goes back quite a long time. This is not just the last few years’ worries about especially NATO infrastructure moving closer to Russia’s borders. It is obviously really concerned about especially nuclear capabilities moving closer to Russia’s borders and of course to the high north and the Russian fleet there. There are worries about being blocked in or prevented from freedom of action by the West in many ways.
When it comes to hardware, just like Russia has its strategic nuclear capabilities as the backbone of its deterrence strategy against the West and NATO, the same goes for the West. Here, the UK is important and has become even more so since the US has weakened its commitment to Europe as one of the nuclear powers there. What comes out from the war in Ukraine is the importance of air defence and missile defence. There in particular, what would be threatening to Russia is more close co-operation between European NATO members, because that would deny conventional Russian long-range capabilities.
The Navy is something they seem to be particularly interested in when it comes to the UK. They always like to pick up the negative aspects, but the Atlantic Bastion initiative especially was picked up in the Russian media with quite a lot of interest. It was noted that Russia was identified as the main threat that this is supposed to or intended to counter.
When it comes to deterring Russia, military readiness and preparation is important. NATO has done a lot there. It has increased exercises strengthening its eastern flank. Hardware and mass in that sense is important. I know that this is quite a broad answer, but it was quite a broad question.
John Foreman: I think that Russia has a Pearl Harbor complex, as one Russian said to me. That is the fear of an overwhelming surprise attack that decapitates the regime, whether that is by nuclear forces or precision strike. That fear has been around certainly nuclear weapons, complemented by Tomahawk in the first Gulf War and what America can achieve by aerospace attack. In all the exercises I used to go on, the first part of the exercise was a massive American attack, which is repelled by the Russians and we sweep to victory. That first bit is punishing damage and that is what they hear.
After the SDR was published, I contacted somebody I knew in Russia and said, “What do you think about the SDR?” They said, “That’s a good question”, so they wrote an article. They picked out, from the UK perspective, alliance cohesion and all that stuff, modernisation of the nuclear deterrent enterprise, acquisition of sixth-generation fighter bombers, the 7,000 new missiles to hold western Russia at risk, the acquisition of a new tactical nuclear capability to get us back into the nuclear game, plus digitalisation. It was those together, plus the maritime stuff. They see us as a maritime power that spent our last 400 years trying to contain Russia’s access to the global commons. They see nuclear submarines, and the investment in new nuclear submarines in particular, as a way of challenging their deterrent and preventing them accessing what they see as their markets. They have to get their stuff out to market by ship.
Lord Boateng: What sort of conventional military deterrents land best with Russian decision-makers?
John Foreman: As I said, long-range precision. There is Tomahawk. You saw the angst when there was discussion about Tomahawk going to Ukraine. I did not think that it was going happen. There is SCALP, Taurus, Tomahawk and the Anglo-German project to deliver a 2,000-kilometre range conventional missile, preferably, I would hope, dual use, but I think that that was not recommended in the SDR. I always thought that a dual-use capability, which the Russians wielded against us, would be particularly noticed.
The Tomahawk issue is totemic for them and has been since 1991. If you see what happened in Iran, and the decapitation strike by the Americans against the Iranian regime, that will not have settled nerves in Moscow about the power of the American air force.
Lord Boateng: How do the drone wall, maritime patrols and the recent activity in the channel go down with them?
John Foreman: It is part of it, but I do not think that it is existential. The reason why the Ukrainians are using drones is that they do not have long-range missiles. If they had lots of long-range missiles they would be pummelling Russian targets across Russia. They have had to use drones because they did not have the capability to have their own missiles.
Lord Boateng: Do any of you have any thoughts about the risks of nuclear miscalculation? Are they changing? How is that affected by the state of US extended deterrence in Europe? What are the dangers there? What do we risk getting wrong?
Professor Bettina Renz: The upside is that we have seen that Russia is a lot less willing to escalate to nuclear weapons than people had assumed, especially when it comes to tactical nuclear weapons, because there was a lot of fear about that when it comes to Ukraine.
In speaking about air superiority, I agree. This is something that the Russians have been looking at for a long time. The biggest danger, if it came to a war between Russia and NATO forces, would be how to avoid a Russian first strike of nuclear capabilities if it faced defeat by conventional forces from the West.
Again, I agree that Russia has always seen air superiority or air power in particular, since the 1990s—it goes back to the first Gulf War—as a disadvantage for it, or an advantage of the West. Again, we need to bear in mind that a war between Russia and NATO, which needs to be avoided by all means, would look very different from the war between Ukraine and Russia, because Ukraine is not nuclear-armed.
That balance really needs to be borne in mind, because Russia has been very clear that, if it faced conventional defeat, or the regime was threatened as a result, it would potentially escalate to nuclear weapons.
John Foreman: I have lots of thoughts, but the Russians signalled to us before the invasion, and since, that they do not want to escalate what they regard in their military model as a local conflict in Ukraine to a regional conflict with NATO and, from there, to a “global” conflict with the United States. As I said, generally, Russia has stuck to the norms of nuclear posture in terms of its strategic deterrence exercises, the alert states of its forces, and the deployment patterns of its submarines and aircraft, as well as updating its nuclear doctrine from 2020 to 2024, so we understand clearly what its red lines are. That has been useful in many ways, not as a step towards escalation, but to understand where its real red lines are in terms of, as you said, conventional strike, damage of the nuclear firing chain, or massive cyberattack.
Overall, it is not in the Russians’ interest to escalate on nuclear, and it is not in ours either. When Tony Radakin came to Moscow, one of the points that we made to General Gerasimov was that, whatever happened in Ukraine, we did not want to see that become a trigger for something much more concerning and more dangerous.
Q8 Liam Byrne: John Foreman, can I just try to integrate the last two questions? One day, it is possible that the Government publish a defence investment plan. We do not know quite when that will happen, but we have to try to have a semi-rational debate in this place about whether the Government have their priorities right. You have, together, listed a set of capabilities that the Russians, you say, would regard as a serious threat.
I am interested in how you would prioritise those investments in order to try to give us a ladder of escalation that might allow us to deter some of the behaviour that we are seeing at the moment. Some of these capabilities are going to take some years to bring on stream. They are going to be pretty expensive and are going to require us all to make some difficult choices. Do you have a sense about what you would try to brigade in the short, medium, and longer-term buckets in order to try to give us an effective ladder of escalation as soon as possible? I know that is really hard.
John Foreman: If you are speaking honestly, the problem with the SDR is that it tried to be all things to all people.
Liam Byrne: Yes, exactly.
John Foreman: It tried to show a balanced force, where we can afford a strategic reserve corps for the Army, submarines, and new aircraft, and we did not make any choices.
We also decoupled the aspiration from delivery. We have now spent two years inspecting our navels, to come up with nothing, which has concerned our allies, particularly the Americans, and made the Russians look askance, saying, “What are the British up to?”
There is not going to be any new money in the short term, so my number one priority is to get what we have out in terms of readiness. I am concerned about talks of trimming RDEL or resource money in the near term, at the expense of capital spending in the future. That is a false economy.
Getting the forces that we have to readiness in order to meet our NATO commitments should be our number one goal. Ships are stuck alongside. If we think nuclear submarines are important for deterrence, why are they sat alongside? Why are we not moving heaven and earth to get them out? Why do we have our frigate programme so stretched out? As the old ones are going, we are going to end up with a massive frigate gap. That is the Navy.
The second thing that I would say is that the Army does not provide much deterrence value. The Russian army does not think that either, because it will never be big enough for the Russians to think it is more than just a speed bump. The things I mentioned here are what the Russians said are the priorities.
We can discuss the Army’s role, but I agree with Lord Sedwill’s commentary over the weekend that, if we had to choose, noting I have been in the Royal Navy for 40 years, our traditional maritime strategy of air/sea is probably where we have to focus.
We need to fill that gap. Getting the money for Trident and Dreadnought is fantastic, but the bit in the middle that worries me is the 7,000 missiles. You have good ideas from Ukraine. There are good ideas in Germany. How do we put the rocket boosters behind that to complicate Russian decision-making?
Liam Byrne: I just want to pressure test something, because there is some commentary that the priority that we have is to “learn the lessons from Ukraine” and build a whole load of productive capacity to be able to start producing millions of drones left, right and centre. You have just given a different account to that analysis. How do you help us reconcile those two points of view?
John Foreman: I do not think that the recommendation that we stockpile loads of drones for a war that is probably not going to happen is the right way about it.
Liam Byrne: You do not, did you say?
John Foreman: No, because we should focus on deterrence and not on, as I said, the national security strategy being in a defensive crouch, saying that, one day, the Russians come and we need drones. By all means, let us learn the technological lessons and base smart start-ups in the UK, working with Ukraine and others, so that, if the balloon goes up, we can quickly ramp up. We do not need loads of warehouses full of stuff that then goes out of date.
I was in Ukraine in March. I spoke to a Ukrainian guy who came back from the front line. He said that the innovation cycle in the front line is in weeks and days, but that, every mile or kilometre you get back from the front, it adds to that. In Kyiv, the innovation cycle is weeks and months, and then, when it gets to the West, it is years.
Liam Byrne: So it might make sense for us to have productive capacity, but not necessarily stockpiles.
John Foreman: No, not at all, because it is not going to deter. A drone is not going to deter Russia. Putin’s goals and risk-reward calculus are not going to be changed by drones. They will be changed by missiles—nuclear and conventional.
Q9 Lord Watts: In some ways, it feels like Russia is waging war against NATO and not the UK, but it takes the view that the UK has been leading the NATO charge in Ukraine. Is that surprising, given the comments made by some people in NATO—for example, wanting to expand NATO, as they would see it, and surrounding Russia with potential other enemies? People are suggesting that there may be a war in the next few years. I just wonder whether that is helping the situation or hindering it. It is about how it is perceived by others.
The second thing is the issue about whether the sanctions are the right ones. We have sanctioned a lot of individuals, but they are the easy sanctions. They do not seem to have worked. What are your views on whether the sanctions that we have used are the right ones, and whether we should have more effective ones?
I have some further comments on what we just heard. The Black Sea fleet has been kept in port because of potential missile attacks. The Americans do not want to go off the coast of Iran, because they feel that they are under threat as well. What use would large ships be in any potential conflict with the development of drones? We know that Ukraine is at the forefront of it, but they are developing very rapidly and becoming more difficult to detect and to stop. Those are just a few issues.
John Foreman: Can I just machine gun these back? Then I will pass to Sam. The Black Sea is smaller than and half as rough as the North Sea, which is half as rough as the North Atlantic. I am all for learning lessons from Ukraine in terms of the land war, and at sea and in the air, but we have to be very conscious of our needs when learning lessons from Ukraine, and not just say, “Hey, Ukraine has great drones. We need great drones”. I hope that these systems that have been proven in Ukraine complement but do not replace what we have.
Lord Watts: If you look at Iran, the biggest navy in the world has not been effectively used in the conflict there.
John Foreman: Nelson said the same thing: only a fool puts a fleet in sight of a fort. We know that, but a distant blockade is a valid tactic.
On sanctions, they are working against the Russian economy. My concern has been on sanctions enforcement and carve-outs, such as the one around Russian-produced products, which was disgraceful. Also, the sloth with which the European Union has managed to wean itself off Russian energy—oil and gas—weakens the overall structure.
I do not think there is going to be a war in 2030. I have been talking to people closer in the know than I, and I think that deterrence holds, both nuclear and conventional. As we spoke about, the unconventional space is probably where the action is, but not the chance of full-blown conflict.
Lastly, I feel quite passionate about enlargement. I was in Budapest when Hungary joined NATO. If you said to me we cannot let those countries execute their free will to join the alliance of their choice because of the Russians holding a veto, I would reject that completely. Europe is much safer and more secure with those countries in Europe, because that is their free, democratic will to do so. We cannot have Russia holding vetoes over our security choices.
Professor Samuel Greene: On the NATO front, I would agree broadly with what has been said. There is not a lot of evidence that NATO is a proximate cause. I am not going to sit here and say that Russia is not concerned about NATO. Clearly, Russia is concerned about NATO and would be happier to live in a world in which there were fewer NATO members than more.
That said, the war in 2014 was begun in response to a deep and comprehensive free trade agreement with the European Union, rather than any real prospect of accession to NATO. There was not a constituency of more than about a third of the Ukrainian population. There was not a Government who were pursuing NATO membership in Kyiv at that time.
Coming back to something I said at the very outset, what we have not understood is the degree to which Russia feels threatened by the geoeconomic expansion of the European project. We have tended to think of this as a non-zero-sum game, but Russia sees it in very different terms. That does not necessarily make it legitimate. It is just an understanding of how Russia is seeing the world.
More importantly, however, there is a fallacy buried in all of this, which is that, if we could simply, as greater powers, convince smaller powers not to choose sides, we could live in a world in which there was less potential of great power conflict. What that ends up doing is creating political problems for the Governments of smaller powers that have populations that have ambitions and would like to achieve things in their lives, and do not do well in isolation.
There is a reason why Finland, Austria and others moved right towards the European Union as soon as the end of the Cold War allowed them to do so. It is because it is a route to prosperity. There was an attempt to force a different choice on the Ukrainians, and that ended up bringing down a Ukrainian Government as a result of, at the time, Yanukovych’s decision to withdraw from negotiations on the deep and comprehensive free trade agreement with Europe, so there is a bit of a false bargain in there.
On sanctions, I agree entirely. Personal sanctions have a marginal effect. At best, they are a significant annoyance to the people who suffer from them. There was a theory that they could create political problems for Putin, but that theory has not borne itself out, and that is obvious for all to see. Sectoral and broader sanctions do have an effect. Are they enough to stop the war? Clearly, they are not. Have they raised the cost of prosecuting this war significantly for the Russian regime? Yes. Have they contributed to Ukrainian and European resilience? Quite clearly, they have.
The problem that we have is a process one. Sectoral and even sub-sectoral sanctions are most effective on the Russians when they are unpredictable and repeated. We see, periodically, that a new set of sanctions coming in throws the Russian central bank for a loop for two or three weeks. It struggles to recover and eventually does recover. When it takes us three, four, five or six months to put a new sanctions regime in place, it is going to have time to recover every time. If we wanted to use sanctions as a weapon of war, there is an opportunity to become less predictable about it, but that is an opportunity that the European Union finds difficult to pursue structurally and that neither London nor Washington has really wanted to pursue individually.
Lord Watts: Just touching on the earlier question of linking those two things together, you said you want to expand NATO and you are expecting a war within 10 years. Do you not see a problem with how that is going to be perceived by some?
Professor Samuel Greene: First of all, I have not said either of these things. Secondly, I would agree with John that a war in the near term is unlikely. A number of European Governments, including those on the eastern flank such as the Estonians and the Finns, have been clear about this. They would like to be prepared in order to make a war less likely, and they feel that preparedness makes war less likely. As I have said, the danger that the turrets need to be aimed at is inadvertent escalation rather than conventional military aggression.
However, NATO expansion is something, in fact, that NATO members have pursued rather reluctantly, and aspiring member states have pursued with more enthusiasm, mostly because they perceive different kinds of threats and feel that those threats are most amenable in the context of an alliance. If there were another option on the table, they might pursue it. Russia has acted to try to keep Ukraine out of NATO. It has created the opposite. It has brought NATO into Ukraine in a way that makes Russia less secure. We would hope Russia would learn a lesson from that.
Q10 Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom: Is it possible to say whether the political elite in Russia supports the Putin regime, or is that impossible to say?
Professor Samuel Greene: If you want a name-by-name list of who does and who does not, I cannot, because anybody who put their name on that list would find themselves in some discomfort. The overall indication is that the Russian elite understands how poorly the country is governed, and understands, broadly speaking, the cost that this war has imposed on it.
However, it is a system that awards every one of them considerable power, influence and unaccountability. Political change will create winners and losers, inevitably, without any guarantee of knowing whether you are going to be a winner or loser at the end of that process, so things would have to look so catastrophically bad in the near term before you would think it was worth pursuing that kind of political change.
At the moment, we are caught in a fairly classical collective action problem in which individuals are dissatisfied, but, both individually and as a group, feel that the costs of action outweigh, for the moment, the costs of inaction.
Andrei Soldatov: I probably would second that, because we need to understand that, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russian security services, specifically the FSB, have made a point of attacking every ministry and every federal agency with repressions. The point of these repressions is to prevent people thinking and talking about any political change. Almost everywhere, you can find a deputy, a head of the agency, a governor or a deputy governor in jail. Everybody understands why these people are in jail, because they are squeezed for more compromising information on the leaders of this or that agency. That has kept everyone pretty much under control.
That is why, to start thinking about political change, you need to get people in a room who would trust each other and start talking freely about what could come next, which is not an option right now, unfortunately.
John Foreman: I would mention the example of Prigozhin and his fiery death in Tver, just north of Moscow. That was to send a message that disloyalty gets rewarded with extreme violence, not just to you but to your whole crew and perhaps your family. This whole fear, which Andrei mentioned, of the FSB, of denouncements and of people betraying each other for advancement precludes that unity of effort inside the bits of the elite to move against Putin, because they know the consequences. It could be extraordinary. We know about the ruthlessness with which Alexei Navalny, for example, was murdered in a prison. If the most prominently liberal opposition figure can be murdered in plain sight, what are the consequences for you, your family and friends, and all your money?
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom: I was going to go on to ask whether there is anything we can do about this, and it seems to me that you have answered that question too, so thank you.
Q11 Lord Boateng: Mr Soldatov, putting to one side Putin and his malevolence, could the Russia of Tolstoy and Pushkin ever countenance a NATO fleet in Odesa or Sevastopol?
Andrei Soldatov: First of all, as a journalist in exile, I very much hope that, one day, I will be able to get back to Russia. I strongly believe in Russian society. I still have friends in many cities and towns across Russia who think in the way I think. We talk and I think that there is hope in these people. It is very different from what we had, say, 40 or 50 years ago, when people had no tradition of, experience of or exposure to liberal values. Now we are dealing with a population of several generations who have been exposed to freedom to travel and to express themselves, at least for a very brief period.
Russia is always capable of sudden change and is absolutely unpredictable. Gorbachev was not really predicted by anyone, as far as I understand, and that is one of the lessons. That is what keeps me thinking that we need to be a bit more optimistic than we usually are.
Lord Boateng: Thank you for your evidence and for all you do.
Q12 Lord Hutton of Furness: We have spent a lot of time today looking at how the Russian state is organised and how it has been behaving towards the UK. I just wonder whether there are any bottlenecks that prevent the UK delivering a stronger deterrence to Russia’s hostile actions directed at us. Perhaps, John, you might kick us off on this.
John Foreman: To be honest, as I said, deterrence holds in both nuclear and conventional. If we think about deterrence as having the will to confront Russian threats, the demonstrated and incredible capability for escalation control and management, and the challenge of communication, especially on the will, perhaps, and the capability, we are falling short.
I worked in NATO. I saw the Prime Minister sit next to President Trump and promise considerable investment over the next 10 years. That has not been realised so far, and there is no path to achieve that. The Prime Minister is going to have to sit next to President Trump at the G7 and at the NATO summit, and explain why, to be honest. That problem of credibility is not going to be lost on our NATO allies, on the United States and on the Russians.
Unfortunately, GDP is a crude measure, but it is the measure. You cannot be a leading member of an alliance based on burden sharing if you are not willing to share your burden, and we are falling short.
Lord Hutton of Furness: In your view, then, the principal risk that is holding us back is that of political will.
John Foreman: Yes, and I would not say that as a party-political point, because, over 30 years, all shades of Government have hollowed out defence considerably, for all good reasons—wars of choice, economic problems. Deterrence is not based on the number of tanks. It is cognitive. You have to do the right thing, be seen to be doing the right thing and be prepared to put your money where your mouth is. That is why the question of whether you would use a nuclear deterrent is so important for future Prime Ministers, because it shows the will to use that.
Without the will and the willingness to back up our words with our actions, to support our allies and to pay our fair share, we are making a decision to slide into greater irrelevance in the wider deterrence of Russia inside NATO.
Professor Bettina Renz: We should not forget that deterrence against Russia has held so far against the West. Of course, Russia has stepped up aggressive activities and so on. Although Russian military aggression so far has been and continues to be deterred, we should not forget that we, and especially the UK, have done an awful lot right since the invasion of Ukraine, calling Russia out, being at the forefront of sanctions, supporting Ukraine, and so on.
Before we think of what we are not doing right, let us continue doing these things and be consistent. That is the main thing about our sanctions. Whether they are the right sanctions or not, we need to keep them going before we discuss any other sanctions. Let us also not forget that Russia is not winning this war, either in Ukraine or against the West. Of course, Russia is posing a lot of problems and we should not downplay that. I do not wish to downplay that at all, but, again, what Russia is trying to achieve in many ways is loss of confidence in western values and democracy, and in co-operation between western countries, so let us not give it that, but continue with the course.
Lord Hutton of Furness: Our recent national security strategy talked about the need to take more risks and avoid being overly defensive. John Foreman talked about the defensive crouch referenced in the strategy. Is this the right analysis? What would this mean in policy terms if we were to take more risks?
Professor Bettina Renz: As John said, deterrence consists of capabilities, credibility and communication, so all of it needs to be there. You cannot just call out that it is communication when it is not backed up with any capabilities and certainly not credibility. Again, there needs to be a more forceful approach in many ways. This does not mean using military responses for every airspace incursion. Again, there needs to be a sense of what goes too far in terms of escalation, but we have gone beyond the time where we can just call Russia out and try to ask it nicely to stop what it is doing. This credibility needs to be there, but this is also being stepped up, as we have seen over the last few months.
John Foreman: The SDR and the national security strategy were right to reject the fortress Britain approach of homeland defence, massive air defences, bunkers, and just focusing on the homeland. British interests extend way beyond the English Channel and beyond Europe, and we have to have the capabilities in place to deal with those. As we have seen in the Gulf, we cannot just divorce ourselves from what is happening in the Red Sea, the Gulf or the Indian Ocean. It was the right policy choice, and the logic is in that document and the SDR. It is now just about implementing it. I would say we need fewer reviews, strategies and frameworks going forward, and more doing, to be honest.
Q13 Lord Tunnicliffe: You have given us a very interesting perspective of military power and how it should be used. Thank you for that. Is there any role left for soft power? I will settle for no.
Professor Samuel Greene: There is a role for soft power. John mentioned the long telegram. If and when you get to the end of the long telegram, it talks about soft power, although not in those terms. It had not been invented yet. At the end of the day, if we wanted to outlast the Soviets and win a war that nobody could win if it became a shooting war, it was going to be done on the basis of the attractiveness of our societies and our systems, and that still remains the case.
The uncomfortable part for us is that we increasingly find ourselves fighting that soft power battle on our own territory rather than on other people’s. That is something that we are not accustomed to and probably need to become a little more accustomed to.
The idea that our colleagues in Washington seem to have, in the current Administration, that we can abandon principles and ideas of rule of law, human rights, war crimes, and that sort of thing, and simply follow the principle that might makes right, creates a world in which we lose the high ground that we have fought for, but that also helps motivate others.
The reason that we find ourselves having allies among Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians or others is the attractiveness of the opportunities that our societies provide versus the unattractiveness of the opportunities that Russia provides. It matters.
John Foreman: Is it time for an obligatory Reagan quote? Ronald Reagan spoke about not containing communism but transcending it. The health and vigour of our society, confidence and all the stuff at the bottom of the long telegram will help us dismiss Putinism, as communism was, as a bizarre chapter in history. We should focus not just on securitisation in our response, but also the positive message that our system can provide, and does provide around the world.
I do not see any people wanting to be Russian, being attracted to the Russian model, buying Russian cars or computers, regardless of the fact that they are all highly talented.
Lord Boateng: They buy Chinese cars.
John Foreman: The Chinese are eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, because they have thrown themselves on the model. The Putin model is a dead end. Approaching this with confidence is the right way about it, through soft power. Having said that, the Russians do not understand soft power at all. They had a soft power institute, Rossotrudnichestvo, but, because it had no traction, they closed it—
Andrei Soldatov: No, it is very much alive.
John Foreman: —or rebadged it more as a tool for security and influence operations. Again, the model of Putinism is not particularly attractive, if you see who turned up in St Petersburg last week, for example.
Q14 The Chair: That is a good point. That has been a particularly insightful and illuminating session. John Foreman, you mentioned the decision to invade Crimea and said that it was likely that Putin was surrounded by friends. Are there any names you want to share with us?
John Foreman: The two brothers.
Professor Samuel Greene: Rotenberg.
John Foreman: Kovalchuk and Rotenberg. I do not think that Lavrov was in the room. I do not think that Shoigu was in the room.
The Chair: Lebedev?
Andrei Soldatov: No.
Professor Samuel Greene: He might have been in the room.
John Foreman: Sechin. It is people like that who you might expect to be in the room if we or you decided to launch—
The Chair: That helps us understand how things work there and how things may be decided in future, so that is a real lesson for us. That concludes today’s session. Thank you so much to all of you.