Examination of Witnesses (Questions 36-39)
PROFESSOR MARGOT
LIGHT AND
MR JAMES
SHERR
24 FEBRUARY 2009
Q36 Chairman: I wonder if I could ask
you, please, to introduce yourselves.
Professor Light: My name is Margot
Light. I am Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the
London School of Economics. I have been studying the Soviet Union
and Russia for the last 35 years. I am really an old Soviet hand.
I was a student in the Soviet Union in 1969-70 and I caught that
disease from which one never gets cured, which is studying the
Soviet Union. I have been teaching and writing about it ever since.
Mr Sherr: My name is James Sherr.
I am Head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House.
At one level, my interest in Russia, for family reasons, began
at the age of two. I have been professionally engaged in the subject
since the early 1980s, initially with what is now the Advanced
Research Assessment Group of the Defence Academy, focusing on
the Armed Forces and Security Services, not their capabilities
but their thinking and the culture behind their thinking, and
eventually two-thirds of the time very assiduously on Ukraine,
its security problems, its defence security sector reform. From
the mid 1990s to the present I have been a consultant to NATO,
both on Russia and the Ukraine, and I took up my present post
last June.
Q37 Chairman: Do you believe that
Russia poses a military threat to other countries, including,
say, the Ukraine?
Mr Sherr: To be honest, it is
a term, for reasons and twitchy reasons, that I do not use and
tend not to like. I do not think there is an intention within
the Russian political or military leadership to pose what we call
a military threat to any NATO country. There has been nevertheless—and
Georgia bears this out—over the past 10 years, since Vladimir
Putin became President, a very focused effort to make the Russian
armed forces fit for a wide range of regional contingencies, projecting
power on a regional scale, including developing the nuclear means
designed to deter others from intervening in regional conflicts.
Despite the military establishment's evident unhappiness with
the fact that, to this day, by a NATO standard, for reasons you
have heard in part in the last session, Russia's armed forces
have some striking deficiencies, when it comes to their core task,
they have done very well. There are two other areas I think we
need to be concerned about. The first is the less conventional
side of military activity, and, just as important, the activity
of military formations that are not subordinated to the Russian
Ministry of Defence, that are part of the Federal Security Service,
that are part of military intelligence or part of foreign intelligence.
The relationship between some of those forces and operations and
the type of events we saw in Estonia in 2006 is a cause of concern,
and there are some interesting enigmas there. I am even more concerned
by the fact that President Putin, as he then was, in October last
year assigned the Russian Navy a high priority in performing energy-related
tasks. He said specifically that the Baltic Fleet will construct
and provide security for the projected North Stream pipeline and
deal with its environmental security. This raises a whole range
of questions, particularly now, when we are looking at juridical
ambiguity about waters in the Barents Sea, the Arctic, new energy
discoveries and so on, and bearing in mind how crowded the Baltic
Sea is. That in itself is the subject of a very great concern.
Q38 Chairman: Thank you. Professor
Light, would you like to add anything to that or disagree with
it?
Professor Light: I do not think
that Russia poses a military threat to NATO and nor do I think
that it poses a military threat to its immediate neighbours. I
do not think that there will be an attack of the kind that occurred
during the Georgian war against any other countries. The country
that is most often suggested as a possible scenario is Ukraine,
particularly because of the large Russian population in the Crimea,
but I think that the situation is very different there. Russia
has other means of influencing what happens in Ukraine and I do
not believe that there will be a military attack.
Q39 Chairman: Do you think that any
of that poses any threat to the UK as such?
Professor Light: No. Well, in
the sense that if there were to be an attack, NATO would have
to respond and Britain, as part of NATO, would have to respond,
it is clearly going to affect British foreign policy, but I do
not think that British security is affected.
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