Oral evidence: Towards the next Defence and Security Review: Part Two:NATO HC 358Tuesday 24 June 2014
Oral evidence, 24 June 2014.
Witnesses
Major General Neretnieks, (retired), Robin Niblett, Chatham House, and Igor Sutyagin, RUSI, gave evidence.
Chair
Welcome back to the session. The Committee will now hear from Major General Neretnieks, Robin Niblett and Igor Sutyagin. The session will be opened by my colleague, Madeleine Moon.
Mrs Moon
A nice easy opener and starter for 10: why was NATO unable to predict and so slow to react to events in Ukraine?
Igor Sutyagin
One of the main reasons for lack of prediction was that the Kremlin failed to predict these events, because the original plan, as far as—
Chair
Dr Sutyagin, could you speak up a little bit?
Igor Sutyagin
Yes, I will try. If you read these small signs, you will see that it seems the original plan was quite different. The original plan was to prevent Ukraine from drifting westward. To do that—that was the idea of that federalisation—it was necessary to establish some sort of entity controlled by Russia, within Ukraine, which would have its say on Ukrainian foreign policy. Ukraine is a united country, but one unique entity, the autonomous republic of Crimea, was the single entity that was not absolutely united with Ukraine and it had a 58% ethnic Russian population. So the general plan, as far as I can read that, was to establish a semi-puppet state in Crimea, influence that, and, via Crimea, influence Kiev’s decisions. That was the original idea. It was mentioned in the previous session that Russia’s policy is very much opportunistic. When people in the Kremlin have seen the opportunity for lots of gains: to save $5 billion a year—the discount for basing the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol—to solve the territorial problem with Ukraine about the Kerch strait, which was not settled for 23 years, and to solve the problem and question of domestic support in Russia for Vladimir Putin, it was considered that there were lots of gains and nothing to lose. Just temporary losses, like in 2008; then the West will swallow Crimea as it swallowed South Ossetia. So it was the perfect move. They have moved with that plan, forgetting about the original idea to stop Ukraine from drifting westward. That is why they had to launch another operation, instead of the Crimean operation, in the east of Ukraine, under the very same slogan of federalisation: the establishment of something which would stay within Ukraine, but still influence Ukrainian policy. That is why it was impossible to predict this move—the annexation of Crimea—because it was not the original plan. No one in the Kremlin predicted that.
Robin Niblett
I would just add another angle from my perspective, which is that I do not think Governments in the West—collectively, NATO—thought that Ukraine would pan out the way Ukraine panned out. I think, first of all, the expectation was that somehow a deal would be done with President Yanukovych around the Vilnius summit last year that would allow some type of progress to take place on the economic association agreement with Ukraine. With that having been turned down, I think people thought the protest would go so far but eventually, with the deal done—I cannot remember which weekend it was—involving European Foreign Ministers as well as Sergei Lavrov and the Ukrainian Government, the thinking was that some diplomatic solution would be discovered within Ukraine, and they did not expect the protestors to still keep protesting and the killings to take place and then for Yanukovych to flee. The first point is that I just do not think we read Ukraine right, never mind whether Russia read the situation right. I do not think we read the way Ukraine would pan out correctly. Secondly, we have had a mental map for at least 10 years of Russia as an evolving strategic partner. I say “we” but I would say parts of Europe. It is certainly in the lexicon of NATO; it is in the founding charter and the NATO-Russia Council. But to go from that to thinking of Russia as ultimately an opponent was a very difficult shift. The third part was tactical and maybe gets to the point that Igor made just now. I don’t think we expected Vladimir Putin to annex Crimea within two days of their own declaration of independence. That really was—certainly to me, though maybe not to Igor and others—a surprise. I can hazard guesses as to why they did it. That redrew the options for diplomatic reaction very quickly. From then on, a line had been crossed, at least in terms of rule of law, that it was very difficult to come back on.
Mrs Moon
Is there an essential problem with NATO and its capacity to react? If Russia can do something in a matter of two or three days but NATO needs 28 days to react, what is the essential problem? How do we build on our capacity to react faster and to keep abreast of events?
Major General Neretnieks
It is a bit problematic for me to answer that, Sweden not being a NATO member. But as an outside observer, I would say that NATO is not what it was when it comes to decision making, fast reactions and capabilities. That of course makes it difficult to react on such a surprising situation that evolved here. No one expected it. If you don’t have good processes for handling such situations, it will take time.
Igor Sutyagin
I will add a slightly different dimension. I think there is a cultural and an existential problem for NATO now. I would like to quote the author of two German war plans, Field Marshal von Schlieffen, on exactly this sort of situation: “He who does not fear to use violence will win and his victory is all the more assured if his opponent avoids violence.” That is one of the fundamental reasons why NATO in this situation is fundamentally much less effective than Russia, because Russia is willing, not so much to exercise violence, but to bluff with violence, and NATO is certainly not prepared for that.
Robin Niblett
I would come at it from a slightly different angle. NATO took time to act, but NATO wasn’t attacked. Here we are judging NATO as having failed, but a member of NATO was not attacked. We all know that to make decisions among an alliance of 28 countries is going to be complicated and slower. There is a lot more capacity for rapid action within the Russian system, just its system of government and so on, never mind Iraq and Afghanistan. The simple point I want to make is if Russia had attacked Lithuania or Poland, let’s see how quick the reaction would have been. Even over Libya, the time to make a decision in the end was relatively quick and that was an out-of-area action. My simple point is that NATO was not attacked. I would like to define the problem a little differently. The fact of the matter is that there are 28 countries with different geographic viewpoints. There are a lot of reasons why it is going to make us slow, but when you are not being attacked and a member of the alliance is not being attacked, it is going to make it even more complicated.
Mrs Moon
Would you agree that reaction times should be one of the critical things that is looked at at the Newport summit?
Robin Niblett
Absolutely. There are so many ways in which NATO could improve its preparedness, but the most important thing it will need to do is think through a common perspective of what the security risk is. What we are going to come out of this crisis with post hoc is a very different perception of European security being at risk, which we did not enter it with. That will probably make decision making a little quicker.
Igor Sutyagin
I fully agree but would like to add one minor detail. I slightly disagree with one thing. NATO was not formally attacked but NATO’s interests have been attacked. The problem is that what has happened in Ukrainian Crimea is that effectively, without diplomacy, if you behave in a crazy way you get what you want and you get out with impunity. The problem is that there are so many people around the globe who would love to follow this pattern established by Vladimir Putin, which creates a major threat to the interests of NATO members—maybe not NATO as an organisation. I like to use this example in the institute: the fact is that the Malvinas lay much closer to Argentina than the Falklands to the UK, and there are some forces in Argentina that would love to grab the Malvinas back for Argentina. The point is that this crisis goes far beyond Russian-Ukrainian relations, and even the problem of European security is a problem of the world order. Dealing with the crisis is not about punishing Vladimir Putin for improper behaviour; the restoration or preservation of the world order is the issue for NATO. That is why I would say that NATO interests have been damaged.
Robin Niblett
A quick comeback: I do not think that Vladimir Putin has got off with impunity. We can come back to this later, but I think that there are plenty of examples to give that show that Russia is paying a big price.
Mr Havard
Let us just deal with the question of capability. The argument could be that because we have been dealing with expeditionary warfare, terrorism and all this sort of stuff, we have not configured ourselves to have conventional deterrence and the ability to do conventional deterrence. Is it a matter for the NATO summit to rededicate itself to that sort of approach? What sort of comments have you got about that? The US attitude to this is actually quite interesting. It is quite determined—over a long period of time, it would appear—to do something. What do you see coming out of the NATO summit discussions about enhancing the capability for conventional deterrence and this business about—if not permanent basing, persistent basing and changing the lay-down?
Major General Neretnieks
I would like to quote a Russian general, after Georgia 2008, who said something like: we used conventional, old-time tactics. It turned out to be asymmetric warfare, because others were not prepared for it. I think you really have a point that we have been concentrating so much on fighting insurgencies and so on that we have very much lost our own capability to fight conventional war. What is worse, we have also, let us say, “fooled” our allies—the Baltic states and others—to train for such contingencies instead of for territorial defence or conventional warfare.
Chair
General, on that, I know that you have looked at the Zapad 2013 exercise. Could you give us a brief insight into what you concluded from looking at that exercise?
Major General Neretnieks
Yes. I think that Zapad 2013 and other similar exercises—Vostok and others—that the Russians have conducted show that the Russians have regained their capability to mount large conventional military operations. They are, I would say, some years ahead of us if we started to train for the same thing today. They have regained a capability that they had lost and we have nearly lost, but now, when you look at Zapad 2013, that is a large-scale conventional military operation.
Robin Niblett
A couple of quick points on this. If we look forward to the NATO summit, as you asked, on one hand it strikes me that there is a strong, growing consensus on the need to improve NATO’s capacities for collective defence. I was involved in chairing an experts group for NATO that reported on 10 June. Our paper and the papers prepared by other groups that were convened by the NATO Secretary-General all made that point. It was interesting to see the amount of consensus, if not across Governments, at least across thinkers from different parts of Europe, which took a relatively similar position on this about the need for pre-positioning equipment, proper exercises, snap exercises, command and control improvements—one could go on. There is a long list, and you will find them everywhere. As the NATO Secretary-General has described, I think there will be a sort of NATO readiness action plan of some sort—I would imagine that will be put forward—that will recognise the fact that the kind of enlargement that was undertaken in the past decade ended up being politically credible but perhaps not militarily credible. Now it will need to be made militarily credible as well. That will be an important improvement. I will simply say that I do not necessarily think that expeditionary forces are a distraction because many of the capabilities you need for expeditionary forces are going to be relevant for the kind of deployments that may need to be made from one part of Europe to another. The kinds of interoperability that were developed through Afghanistan on operations are likely to be useful if they can be sustained. I do not think it was a waste but it was obviously a different focus geographically. One more point: the danger is—I am not an expert on Russia but my sense is that they are very good at feinting and making you put a lot of effort in one place and you go somewhere else. Most of what Russia has been successful with so far in the context of Ukraine, and even other parts of eastern Europe, has not been conventional military action. It is described by—maybe Keir Giles talked about this earlier—this non-linear form of aggression, let’s call it, that does not necessarily rely on the kinds of tools that are easily deterred or defeated by the tools of conventional defence. This is going to have to bring us into a whole other area of resilience and strength that is well beyond what might be under a NATO heading.
Mr Havard
But backed up by 150,000 conventional forces at the back. Do you know what I mean?
Robin Niblett
Absolutely and that is part of the mix.
Mr Havard
But does this speak to a new NATO strategic concept process?
Robin Niblett
The NATO strategic concept is three main parts of collective defence. Crisis management and co-operative security of 2010 remain valid. It is whether we are capable of delivering them that will be the difference. I think the NATO strategic concept was developed at a time of relative strategic security so it was theoretical. Now we are having to make those capabilities real because we are no longer living in world of theoretical threats.
Mr Havard
What do you reckon, General?
Major General Neretnieks
I don’t want to be misunderstood. There is nothing wrong with expeditionary capabilities. Different countries need different capabilities. If we speak about the Baltic states or Poland, I would say their priority should be some kind of territorial defence, but when it comes to Britain—that is a totally different thing. Your task—if I may say so—is to help others by going there; that is expeditionary capabilities.
Igor Sutyagin
I fully agree with Robin. The fact is that it is not exactly about conventional deterrents. What is happening in Ukraine now is asymmetric warfare. If you looked at the troops deployed around Ukraine, there was an abnormally high amount of spetsnaz units. They represented up to 8% of deployed troops, which is less than 1% of armed forces. It is eight times more representation than usual. What is going on in the east of Ukraine now is classic spetsnaz tactics because they have special reconnaissance units. They have special reconnaissance tasks and special operational tasks and second among these operations is to establish insurgents—lead them, use them as cover and as a base for their own activity. That is exactly what is going on in the east of Ukraine. That is why I think that it is necessary, maybe—I agree with Keir Giles—to re-establish some knowledge of Russia and to understand those tactics. Interestingly, we discussed the article of General Gerasimov on his presentation this year, just a month ago, but he published nearly the same thesis in February 2013 describing that. As a matter of fact, the scenario that we have now in Ukraine was tested in Zapad 2013, on those exercises, from the other side because they suppressed insurgents. However, the insurgents, against whom they ran those operations, were also trained in something, and that is exactly what they are doing in the east of Ukraine now. That is why I think it is necessary to re-establish this knowledge of Russia—to carefully read the small signs, to understand what they mean and to project that into the future. It was possible to have a warning more than a year ago. That possibility was missed. That is why I think that in addition to conventional deterrence it is probably necessary to have an eye on this deterrence or maybe on countering this asymmetric warfare; countering spetsnaz operations. That is why maybe Estonians are quite right in putting an emphasis on spetsnaz units.
Mr Havard
Can I ask then, out of all that, planning at the moment in NATO is about generic plans, not planning for these things. Do you think there is a need to establish a different planning process within NATO to respond to all of this?
Robin Niblett
I feel I am not well enough informed on NATO planning to give an accurate reply on that. I would simply say that the need for contingency planning of the sort that reflects the kind of intentions that Russia has demonstrated and even to project them out to things that we would like to think as being unthinkable—I do not know all the details of the Zapad exercise, but didn’t they end up with a tactical nuclear strike of some sort? I think we have to be able to play hardball on our exercises as well, to demonstrate that kind of thinking, and not to be treating military exercises as a way to try and demonstrate forms of appeasement, I suppose.
Igor Sutyagin
If I may add very briefly, the very last time that the United States had a plan of war against Canada was in 1946, so they had this contingency plan when it was absolutely clear it was not necessary. The military still planned it, so probably that is the military approach.
Major General Neretnieks
Your question has a bearing on what Mrs Moon asked earlier, why did NATO react so slowly? If we leave Ukraine to one side, because that was not a NATO problem, but it would be a NATO problem in the Baltics or Poland. If you do not have well-thought-through contingency plans then you will be a very slow starter and it will also be a quite chaotic operation if you have not prepared it well.
Derek Twigg
Can I put it a different way? If you were sitting in Putin’s position in Russia, what do you think he and the Russians have learnt from what has happened over the past few months in Ukraine? What are the lessons they will they take from that and how do you think that will influence their future actions?
Igor Sutyagin
First, I would say that it was probably considered nearly a complete success. It worked as planned. Statements about the necessity to restart business as usual are already here. The Russian press is full of information about foreign offices of EU proposing not to undertake any sanctions. So it seems they do believe that it is good tactics, which means that they might and probably will try those tactics once again, if there is another opportunity. That is why I think it is very important to send proper messages. The current messages are wrong.
Derek Twigg
One part of my question relates to what you have just said, but what have they learnt from our response, or lack of response? What have they learnt from that? What does that mean for the future?
Robin Niblett
My view is somewhat different. I take where Igor started from and I assume where some of the previous set of evidence went, which was this idea of having to react opportunistically, even around plans that had been developed and they had in their drawer that they could use. However, it was not a situation that they foresaw—the Maidan and Yanukovych having to flee—so they have had to react from that point. The lesson learned—the reality—is that it looks like Ukraine will sign an association agreement by the end of this week, which was what this whole thing was about. The Eurasian Union will not contain Ukraine—that is a massive strategic failure for President Putin’s vision of Russia’s place within its geographic sphere of influence. The South Stream main pipeline that would have let them gradually remove perhaps complete reliance on Ukraine as a transit route through to western Europe for its gas supplies has been stopped, will be investigated and will perhaps get back on but perhaps will not get back on the track, so I think that is a serious diminution of one of their main forms of leverage. In the end, NATO is going to be far more united at the end of this process, and probably a little bit more—I’m not going to overplay it; I think there will be all sorts of political and budgetary limitations—prepared, robust and united in its position within the new members of the alliance than it was before this conflict. I think the lesson is, yes, you can disrupt a country on your border, sure—Lugansk, the Donbass region and Donetsk remain contested areas—but is that a definition of strategic success? Not to me. This is Russia’s border. If Russia remains with an ambiguous situation on a border that is not able to be an outcome that it thought it could be, to me that is a strategic failure. This is Russia’s border, not Britain’s, Italy’s or even Germany’s border. I think their outcome is going to be quite negative. So I think the lesson learned is that Russia is going to have to balance its West-leaning foreign policy with one towards Asia.
Derek Twigg
That’s the Russian view?
Robin Niblett
I think the Russian conclusion is that a partnership with Europe, just as I think west Europeans have mostly concluded that a partnership with Russia, on a strategic level, is not going to be possible. I think they realise that they are going to have their hedge their economic bets far more robustly. I don’t think they will do it particularly well, because they haven’t got that much leverage going to the East. You say, “Gosh. Special operations forces and it all works.” Well it worked here, a village there, but in the big scheme of stuff, I don’t see it working.
Major General Neretnieks
I think that the Russians will see this, when they look at the concrete things—Crimea and such—as reasonably successful. But the two big lessons are that, one, the world does not react. It speaks a lot, but the hard reactions are lacking, especially from the EU, I would say. The big question mark that remains is what will NATO do in the future. But also NATO is a bit divided.
Derek Twigg
What does Russia think NATO is going to do?
Major General Neretnieks
I think their conclusion will be that, “Oh, we got away with it.” Their appetite might grow—“we got away with it”. But one thing that we shouldn’t forget: the Russian present regime has become extremely popular on this adventure. From a domestic point of view, popularity, staying in power or whatever, this has been a huge success.
John Woodcock
The discussion has moved on a little bit, but can I just take you briefly back, Dr Niblett, to what you said earlier in summing up the expansion of NATO being politically useful but without the military capacity to underpin it? Can I challenge you on what seems to be quite an optimistic statement, to say that, actually, now that this was a good thing, and now that we can fill the military capacity? I know that you talked a little bit about transferring forces, but is it actually not the case that we are looking at defending ourselves on more than one front? We had relied on Russia being relatively easy to manage. At a time when all the NATO countries are cutting defence budgets, or at least under great stress, how can we satisfactorily meet the commitments without taking it in a way which would leave us far too vulnerable in another area?
Robin Niblett
My first point would be to say that we had relied on Russia being a partner, but in my personal view, Russia was never going to be the kind of partner that we thought it was going to be. So the reason I take a relatively optimistic line—I think maybe the three of us would agree on this point—is that I think we now see the world a little more clearly than we did before. That, to me, is a good thing. On whether NATO will be united in its position, clearly there are big debates in Germany and in other parts of western Europe about the extent to which we need to get back to business as usual. I think it is interesting that Germany has held a reasonably tough line so far. I think Angela Merkel has turned out to be tougher than expected on this topic. I think even the SPD find it difficult to go back to the kind of position they had in the past. Even popular opinion in Germany has shifted a little bit in the last three to five months. Clearly, we have woken up to a reality that our east is not as benign an environment as we in Europe thought it was. But to me it never was. So this is a good thing that we know it wasn’t. Frankly, I am more concerned about penetration of Russian-type business practices into central, eastern and even western Europe, than in some ways I am about the 150,000 troops. I think we will start to see this as part of a mixed and very intelligent, to a certain point, Russian strategy. But the Russian strategy, which is to bring some of its preferably opaque business practices and ultimately political practices into parts of central and eastern Europe, is going to be that much more difficult to sustain in the coming years now that the cat is out of the bag. Yes, they took Crimea and I think Crimea has been a strategic gain. I don’t think we can deny that, including, I suppose, how the law of the sea will perhaps see this. Russia is going to end up with a series of contested areas around its border that are perhaps ambiguous in international law, where investment might be complex where you will have smuggling, semi-corrupt organised crime units, and not the kind of neighbourhood I would like to live with personally. But if that is the system that the Russian Government believes is going to be good for its future strategic position, good on it. I think that we in the West—maybe optimism is too strong a term, but I hope that we in the West, and you as elected leaders, have more to play with now to make the case to the public that we in Europe still live in a dangerous world. We live in a dangerous world in our neighbourhood to the east. We clearly live in a dangerous world in our neighbourhood to the south. I personally think we have interests that are involved in the space of security, even further to the east towards Asia. It is my job and that of my colleagues here to raise the nature of those dangers. Hopefully, there is something to justify it for you to be able to take as elected politicians to play with. Getting the money is going to be difficult. It is all about choices. But I think the choices are clearer now than they were six months ago.
John Woodcock
But does this require a step up in defence spending or a realignment of defence spending priorities?
Robin Niblett
I will stick by the phrase that we made in our report for NATO which was that however good smart defence pooling, sharing specialisation might be—and they are important parts of what European countries need to do, given that there are different needs and different capabilities—ultimately under 2% you start to not have sufficient critical mass to deal with the range of threats which I see around European nations. Within that 2% —2% is a very blunt number—one would hope that you would have targets perhaps towards particular countries, as General Neretnieks said. But you would focus a certain amount on equipment, on R&D and capability, not simply on keeping up conscript forces or whatever it is that are not contributing to real defence. But I see, hopefully, an arresting of an understanding that it is business as usual with your defence budget and your 0.9% or 1.2% and that in the next five, six, seven years to 2020, or maybe a year or two after it, we might get back to 2% across the board.
Mr Brazier
If NATO needs a new strategy based on real deterrence don’t we need a UK security strategy, including new capabilities to deal with spetsnaz, whether we are talking about being able to assist the Baltic states or concerned about what is happening to our own North Sea oil potentially or other possibly easily picked off targets of choice? There is a curious historical moment: 100 years ago we had a great power that also had remnants of a very strong economy in its German-speaking areas but was nevertheless a political basket case and manifestly coming apart with a military power next to it that was hyperactive, quite powerful, but convinced it was surrounded by other people who wanted to do it down. There is a curious parallel. It is quite a dangerous position you are painting and this whole Committee is enthusiastic about defence spending but what do you suggest our priority should be? If we got a bit of extra defence spending, where should it be focused?
Chair
Can I use my privilege to say a couple of things? One is that I am afraid there is a vote coming and a number of colleagues coming in. Secondly, I am going to slightly bossily direct this to Dr Sutyagin and General Neretnieks, because Dr Niblett has spoken quite a lot recently.
Igor Sutyagin
Actually, I would prefer to stay away from answering this question. I am still a Russian citizen and probably not in a position to advise the United Kingdom on how to spend its defence budget.
Chair
Very good.
Major General Neretnieks
I completely agree, we have to do something about spetsnaz and similar activities, but it should not be done at the expense of something else, because we are lagging behind also in conventional warfare, and we are lagging behind when it comes to cyber-warfare and when it comes to handling media threats or what you could call “influence”. We cannot do it on one piece of the toolbox. We have to have the whole toolbox. To my mind, sorry, but there are no other options today than to increase defence spending. It is not because of my background. Most countries have reached a level where the masses are under-critical. We cannot have good exercises any more; training is not good; and we are lagging behind when it comes to procuring new equipment. 2%? Okay, it’s some kind of goal, but I am afraid that even that will be too little.
Ms Stuart
I want to look more closely at the new NATO structures and your views on them, particularly whether you think abolishing the Northern Command was slightly premature.
Major General Neretnieks
Perhaps it was a good decision, once upon a time, to abolish all these regional commands, but in the world we see today I think it would be very clever to re-establish some of them: Northern Command, perhaps also Southern Command, or something like that. As we said earlier, that is a prerequisite to make good contingency plans. One headquarters in Brunssum cannot make contingency plans for the whole world. What is more, a very important thing is that commanders and staff officers learn to know their counterparts in those areas where they are supposed to operate. That means that you have to partition Europe into operational slices with a command response for each slice: northern Europe, central Europe, southern Europe, or something like that.
Robin Niblett
One very quick comment on that. Something we picked up during the course of our study is that one of the problems you have right now is that the NATO staff in the command structures have been reduced, partly under the expectation that national military forces would supplement those command capabilities, and as I understand it, they have not fully done so. You may want to create more commands, but will people deploy the necessary high-ranked officers to be able to staff those commands? I share the General’s viewpoint. I would simply note that at the moment we have not been investing even in the command structures we have got.
Igor Sutyagin
I am not sure about the re-establishment of mini commands, but the fact is that the Russian Ministry of Defence is going to establish an Arctic Command due to the increasing importance of the Arctic. It seems to me that it might be difficult for NATO Command sitting in just one place to react to actions and events in both north Africa and the Mediterranean, and, at the same time, the Arctic. Northern Command might be a reasonable decision as, first, a response to new challenges and new horizons, and, secondly, it might send a very interesting and important—and a bit dangerous—message to Russia. Re-establishing this command in this extremely sensitive area for Russia, where more than half its sea-based deterrent is concentrated, will be a very sensitive push in that area, forcing Russia to think more in defensive terms than in offensive terms. We discussed the lessons learned. Russian politicians—Putin himself is a tactician so that is why, from his standpoint, it was victory. It is not exactly the Russian standpoint that strategically it has lost. He does not think in strategic terms. That is why he might see this danger as the net result of his actions. That might lead to him reacting in a more defensive way than using these as an invitation to use his spetsnaz. That is why it is dangerous, because the establishment of Northern Command will merely and inevitably lead to some level of confrontation with Russia; maybe not direct, maybe not cold war-style, but some increased confrontation with Russia because it is very sensitive. It will be a very important message for Russia and might be a big deterrent.
Ms Stuart
When the new Secretary-General was announced, there was an argument that the battle over whether NATO should look to the eastern Mediterranean or the north had been won in favour of the north. Is NATO capable of, Janus-like, looking at the north and the eastern Mediterranean with equal importance, or do we just not have the resources for that?
Igor Sutyagin
It is not that clear whether it is possible. The point is that we must not overestimate what is written in the Russian media, for instance, about the Russian armament programme. We must not overestimate Russian armed forces’ capabilities because, for instance, according to the current Russian operational plan, it will be one Russian brigade defending against one American division. That is three times smaller; it cannot defend; it cannot attack. While they have regained some capabilities, they are still limited to regional action. That is the question: whether Russia will be able to present large forces in the Arctic and whether those forces will be so incomparably larger than NATO forces. That question requires deep understanding.
Major General Neretnieks
I do not know if NATO has the capability to look in two directions at the same time, but where do we have NATO members in northern Europe, NATO members that might be under threat? That is especially the Baltic states. Eastern Ukraine is interesting—it is an awful place, really, in many respects—but NATO’s main task must be to look after the interests of its members. Therefore, if NATO has to make priorities, to my mind it has to be northern Europe, especially the Baltic states, because they are extremely hard to defend, if it is even possible to do so. If you have to choose, choose the north.
Robin Niblett
The Norwegians have invested as well, quite actively, in the north. They have a base up there, which I am sure they would be interested in being seen as playing a more active role, especially with their own interests in the Arctic. This business of whether NATO can be Janus-faced—can you have framework nations? Can you have groups of nations that are able to cluster sets of interest in a particular direction? That would be a key question for me, whether it be to the north or the south.
Chair
Very sadly, I think we have reached the bell. I think colleagues have moved through their questions, so let me just say we are very grateful for your time. Thank you very much indeed. Oral evidence: Towards the next Defence and Security Review: Part Two, HC 358 4