Following the Defence Secretary’s statement on the latest situation regarding Russia’s actions towards Ukraine, James Sunderland asks about planning for a possible cross-border refugee and humanitarian catastrophe.
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
History proves that conflict between near-peer or peer adversaries gets very ugly. Although I accept that NATO’s potential for direct intervention is limited due to article 5, what planning is there for a possible cross-border refugee and humanitarian catastrophe?
Mr Wallace (The Secretary of State for Defence)
It is incredibly important that NATO seeks to use the extra troops to provide resilience, reassurance and containment. One reason why we have up to 400 Royal Marines in Poland is to assist Poland should a catastrophe happen and huge numbers of refugees pour across the border. I urge the European Commission to make deep plans about what it will do about potentially massive migrant flows, the like and scale of which we have not seen since the second world war.