PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Ukraine: NATO Allies - 13 March 2023 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

The UK has provided substantial support to our NATO allies as we continue a united response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Over the past 12 months, the Royal Air Force has been deployed in Romania and Lithuania and across the Mediterranean and has completed patrols over the Black sea. We continue to contribute to NATO air activity across Europe. The Army has been deployed in Bulgaria, Romania and Estonia, where we have our enhanced forward presence battle groups. The Royal Navy has completed a major European deployment from the North sea to the Mediterranean. Our UK armed forces continue to strengthen interoperability with Finland and Sweden in anticipation of their accession to NATO. Beyond the US armed forces, no nation has contributed more.

The hon. Lady asks an excellent question, but I hope that she will not mind if I draw an important distinction. NATO is not involved in the planning of or in direct support of the Ukrainian war effort. That is a really important point, because Putin claims the exact opposite to the Russian public and is entirely wrong to do so. Those who support Ukraine do so as an alliance of friends of Ukraine outwith NATO, but of course NATO is invariably supportive of the work that we are doing.

The hon. Lady is right to observe that NATO has a job of work to do to strengthen its eastern flank, to provide wider deterrence against any sort of growth or escalation in the conflict and to make sure that the lessons of modern peer-on-peer war fighting in Ukraine are learned by the entire alliance, and learned quickly.

Labour has fully backed moves to bolster NATO allies in response to the illegal invasion of Ukraine. What steps is the UK taking to ensure that our NATO obligations in respect of enhanced forward presence are completely fulfilled?

In the immediate response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, we doubled the size of the battle group in Estonia as a further show of support for the Estonian Government and recognition of the importance of the enhanced forward presence category. We have also contributed to EFP battlegroups in Poland and Romania in the last 12 months. What will change, and what was announced at the summit in Madrid, is that there will be a new NATO regional defence plan, which will be an evolution of the in-place EFP battlegroups, alongside national defence plans. Of course the UK will be very supportive of the plan in the region that NATO assigns to us, but that is very much under review, and the UK looks forward to hearing the details from NATO once it has finished its work.

Following the very successful Franco-British summit at the end of last week—which was the fruit of an enormous cross-Government effort—does the Minister agree that renewing the bilateral defence partnership with France, the second largest European contributor to NATO, is an important part of not just strengthening the NATO alliance but enhancing European security, particularly in the east?

I really do. It is noteworthy that while relations elsewhere in Government may have been slightly more fraught, within the UK and French Defence Ministries the relationship has remained very tight, and necessarily so. The interdependence between the UK and France is very obvious. Our industrial collaboration is widespread, and will grow as a consequence of last week’s summit—and it is not just in the far east that the UK and France can work together, but in west Africa, where our interests are also very keenly aligned.