Ukraine: Non-recognition of Russian-occupied Territories

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op) [R]]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of non-recognition of Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

Today is 1,435 days since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It has been nearly 12 years since Russia’s invasion of Crimea, which many would say is when the war really began. The same fact stands as it did back in 2022 and back in 2014: we do not recognise the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine as Russian. That is why the policy of non-recognition is as paramount today as it has ever been.

Ukraine is a sovereign state with established borders, including Crimea and the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Those borders are recognised by the United Nations and the majority of states worldwide. All the partially occupied regions voted in a nationwide 1991 referendum for Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. We must preserve the principle of territorial integrity. Ukraine’s borders are internationally recognised and any changes achieved by force have no legal validity. That protects a core principle of international law: the prohibition on acquiring territory through military force. The policy of non-recognition prevents the creation of a dangerous precedent that would allow other states to change borders through military aggression, undermining the UN charter and international treaties. Non-recognition matters because resolutions and official statements on non-recognition provide the legal and political foundations for imposing sanctions, internationally isolating the aggressor and holding it accountable for violations of international norms.

Furthermore, maintaining the status of those territories as part of Ukraine protects rights related to citizenship and legal protection, as well as the future processes of de-occupation and restoration of control. Non-recognition of Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukrainian territories would send a clear signal to Russia, and other states willing to change borders by force, that there is a price to pay for aggression. It is crucial to remember that the weak international reaction to the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 enabled the current wave of Russian aggression, which is much more extensive and violent.

I will address the immensely human side of why non-recognition of Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine is vital, as well as the horrors of occupation for children, civilians and detainees, and the eradication of Ukrainian identity through Russification. I will also address how there are shocking beliefs and disinformation about these atrocities not being true. Finally, I will detail the asks needed to uphold the prospect of non-recognition of Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

Non-recognition sends a single to the Ukrainian state and army that the international community supports its legitimate self-defence, including attempts to de-occupy all of its territory. Historically, non-recognition of illegal occupation made the reverse of such occupation easier, for instance in the case of the Baltic states’ occupation by the Soviet Union. It also sends a signal to our allies that international law matters, a signal to Ukrainian civilians in the occupied territories that the international community cares about their fate, and a signal to Ukranians who had to flee the occupied territories that they might be able to return.

There are some significantly grave atrocities being committed against Ukrainian civilians in the occupied territories. According to Freedom House, the index of civil and political rights in the Russian-occupied territories is minus 1. For comparison, North Korea’s index is 3. The Russian-occupied territories are the least free place in the world. More than 100,000 people in the occupied territories have been killed as of January 2026. If not killed, there are heavy efforts to engineer ideological control. In 2022, the Russian Ministry of Education dictionary instructed teachers on how to “re-educate” Ukrainian children based on Russian “spiritual and moral values”.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on his work on Ukraine and on securing the debate. He is talking about the occupied territories, and I want to raise an issue that we have discovered. In the occupied territory of Alchevsk, there are currently 100,000 people without heating or any form of support, not because of attacks by Ukrainian missiles; it is down to Russia’s incompetence and failure to even look after the territories that they have occupied. Does that not show their lack of care for areas they say should be part of Russia? It is another nail in their coffin of lies. They do not have any interest at all in individuals; they just want the territories, and it is an abomination.

[Alex Sobel]

The right hon. Member is absolutely correct. There is no part of the occupied territories of Ukraine where the standard of living is anywhere near what it was prior to the occupation. People in those territories are being systematically deprived of their livelihoods and there has been a material decline in their standard of living. Obviously, those who object to the occupation have been tortured, mutilated or killed, as Freedom House has evidenced.

I would like to be the first to congratulate and celebrate my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Johanna Baxter) for this week being awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit by President Zelensky. Since coming to this place, she has dedicated much of her time to working towards the return of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia.

[Johanna Baxter (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for his very kind words. I am pleased that he has touched upon the issue of the stolen children, because there are still many thousands of Ukrainian children who have been abducted from their homes, and of course 1.6 million Ukrainian children are subject to militarisation and indoctrination in the temporarily occupied territories.

This week, Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine, warned that Russia has created a “legal cage” to permanently entrap Ukrainian children in these occupied territories, imposing exit bans on children under the age of 14, putting a limitation on escape routes for those who have been abducted, removing orphans overnight from where they are staying, and imposing processes to systematically erase Ukrainian children’s names and identities from their documentation. Does my hon. Friend agree that, in addition to rejecting Russian recognition of Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories, this House must also reject any recognition of the Russification of Ukrainian children and unequivocally condemn Russia’s attempt to erase Ukraine’s future, one child at a time?

[Alex Sobel]

I deeply thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. It is absolutely right that the most vulnerable children on this planet are Ukrainian children in the Russian-occupied territories, and Ukrainian children who used to be in the Russian occupied territories but who are now falsely imprisoned in Russia, either in camps or through false adoption by Russian parents, including members of the Russian Government. There is no greater symbol of how monstrous Russia is than its treatment of Ukrainian children.

Ukrainian civilians in the temporarily occupied territories are being abducted or unjustly imprisoned by Russia on a massive scale. At a minimum, several thousand Ukrainian civilians have suffered this mistreatment. Let me guide hon. Members through Russia’s systemic abuse of the Ukrainian civilian population in the temporarily occupied areas.

First, there is persecution, including the creation of blacklists and the monitoring of the activities of individuals who are associated with civic activism. Secondly, there are arrests in the temporarily occupied territories, which means detaining individuals expressing views that are deemed inconsistent with Russia’s position. Thirdly, there is deportation and forcible transfer, with the use of official and unofficial detention sites in over 30 regions across Russia and Belarus to forcibly transfer detained Ukrainian civilians. Next, there are enforced disappearances. Following deportation, many civilians disappear, and their location and condition remain unknown to their relatives. Finally, there are unfair trials and illegal imprisonment. After some time, often years, civilians are brought to court, where they receive a sentence on fabricated charges, mostly relating to terrorism or espionage, which is straight out of the playbook of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The United Nations has identified more than 100 sites that have been used for these activities since February 2022, located in every occupied Ukrainian province and across Russia and Belarus. Frequently, ad hoc prisons were set up in seized towns, where police stations, Government buildings, basements, schools and industrial sites were used to detain perceived dissidents. Some of these facilities have become notorious. In Donetsk and Luhansk, which have been occupied since 2014, prisons such as Izolyatsia gained a reputation for the use of electroshock torture and beatings. Since 2022, similar filtration camps and makeshift prisons have proliferated across the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv regions.

Today, the Holocaust Memorial Day debate is happening in the main Chamber as we speak. I do not draw parallels with the Holocaust lightly, but the secrecy surrounding these torture camps, in which Ukrainian civilians are persecuted, cannot be overlooked. Ukrainians have been through the Holodomor, the Holocaust and now, Russian occupation. Ukrainian identity is being continuously eradicated, both physically and mentally.

During Russia’s invasion, 664 cultural heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed. Moscow has made it clear that nowhere is immune from missile strikes, even close to NATO territory. Looking outside the occupied territories, at the live targeting of the Lviv region, we have immense fears for the civilian population. Journalist Jen Stout highlights that one of the reasons why Lviv’s historic city centre is so unique and was designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 1998 is that it survived both the first and second world wars intact, unlike so many other central European cities.

Haemorrhaging Ukrainian culture through the killing, forcible kidnapping and removals of civilians and children, and the obliteration of their historic landscape is not the only way in which the Russification of temporarily occupied territories is being carried out. Ukrainian teachers from the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions report that after the occupation they were banned from teaching Ukrainian and using the Ukrainian curriculum, and are required to accept the new system. Those who refused faced persecution, threats of violence and detention in the centres that I described. Many people have been forced to go underground or leave their homes to preserve their identity and safety.

Returning to the atrocities being committed against children, it is alarming that there are points of view about how these atrocities are not ongoing. Overcoming that disinformation with the credibility of non-recognition of Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine is essential. We cannot allow Russian misinformation to win.

[Phil Brickell (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Ukrainian language education has been banned, cultural heritage sites have been destroyed and children have been transferred to Russia under the guise of evacuation, as has been mentioned. Does my hon. Friend agree that those acts demonstrate that occupation is not merely territorial, but an attempt to erase Ukrainian identity, and that that makes the policy of non-recognition all the more vital?

[Alex Sobel]

Absolutely; Russification is the central policy of the Kremlin. It is happening today in the occupied territories, and we need to ensure that it ends and does not spread through the rest of Ukraine. That is why the self defence of Ukraine is so important.

Many of the abducted children have lost their parents, who have either been jailed in the detention centres I discussed earlier, or killed by Russian forces. Russian families come to the occupied territories of Ukraine, abduct the children of detained or murdered parents and take them to Russia. Some Members may have heard the interview on the BBC’s “Ukrainecast” in December about the so-called Russian “children’s rights commissioner”, who is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the allegedly unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. She gave an interview in October on Russian talk show in which she openly discussed a child she claimed to have “adopted” from Mariupol. She described how Philip, a young Ukrainian boy, was reluctant to accept a Russian identity. She described how he spends his time—in Moscow, in her home—on Ukrainian websites and singing songs in Ukrainian, but also how she managed to “gradually” change his mindset to the “way things were”. Those abducted Ukrainian children will consequently be militarised and indoctrinated, and used as troops against their own people.

Those atrocities, along with the disinformation fed to Russian troops about how they are “liberating” Ukrainians by occupying their territories, needs to be called out consistently by the international community. The policy of non-recognition of Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine can help with that process. Temporary occupation, regardless of duration, is illegal and does not confer any territorial rights upon the occupying power. Journalists who have tried to document events have also become victims of torture and repression. Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was abducted and died in Russian captivity after a prolonged secret detention with signs of violence.

An expert mission report by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe found that the arbitrary deprivation of the liberties of Ukrainian civilians has been a “defining feature” of Russian-occupied territories since 2014. These reports underscore that the perpetration of seven particular crimes against Ukrainian civilians by Russian authorities violate international law and likely amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity. These seven interlocking crimes against humanity, which illustrate what I have spoken about today, are: persecution, illegal detention, deportation or forceable transfer, enforced disappearance, torture and other inhumane acts, sexual violence, and illegal imprisonment. They mutually reinforce one another to disable dissent and consolidate control over areas that Russia has illegally occupied during its war of aggression against Ukraine.

[Martin Wrigley (Newton Abbot) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for initiating this important debate and laying before us the scope and scale of the atrocities going on specifically in the occupied areas, as well as in the whole of Ukraine. We have to remember that when—on the blessed day—peace arrives, it will take some time before Ukraine becomes safe. Given the amount of unexploded ordnance, the number of atrocities and the recovery that is required, does he agree that we need to consider options and futures for those Ukrainians to whom we have given shelter in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, to give them an option for when they return, rather than assuming that peace is the point at which they must return?

[Alex Sobel]

If we look back to the 1990s, and the UK’s role in Bosnia and Kosovo in particular, that gives us a model. Many of the people who sought refuge here during those wars were able to stay, but now many have gone back—after we de-mined, supported the process of reconciliation and provided mental health support and other things—and are prominent in society in Kosovo and Bosnia. I hope that in this case we can do the same, helping to support and strengthen Ukraine in the future.

I would like to highlight three main asks in addition to the overall policy, which we should retain, of non-recognition of Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. First, we need to work with major British news outlets such as the BBC—including the World Service—Sky News and The Guardian to profile civil detainee cases, focusing on personal stories such as those of Serhiy Tsyhipa and Kostiantyn Zinovkin. We must reinforce the global legal consensus. Secondly, we need to support evidence-sharing initiatives with the ICC and European prosecutors working on war crime cases. Thirdly, we need to deter any attempts to normalise or legitimise aggression. That must be underwritten, of course, by legitimate and firm security guarantees for Ukraine.

I want to finish with the words of Artur, whom Jen Stout interviewed in 2022:

“To defend Ukraine, we’re defending all of Europe. The West would be next, they’ll capture your cities. Putin fancies himself an Emperor. If you don’t help us, there’ll be no more peace in your homes. I sacrificed my health at 22 years old, to protect the whole of Europe from Russian madness”.

I thank Dr Kseniya Oksamytna of the University of London; Tanya Mulesa of Justice and Accountability for Ukraine; Dr Jade McGlynn of the Centre for Statecraft and National Security; the Foreign Policy Centre; and the Ukrainian embassy in London for their help with this speech. Moreover, I thank the people of Ukraine, whose resilience ensures that Ukraine stays strong through the biting winters and beaming summers. Slava Ukraini!

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Sobel]

We had almost absolute unanimity; I think this is the most unanimous debate that I have taken part in during my time as a Member. Nearly every Member who contributed to it has been to Ukraine, sometimes many times—sometimes, unfortunately, they have had to travel with me. There may be one or two who have not been—I am not sure if the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Fylde (Mr Snowden), has been. I travelled with the Minister when he was the shadow Minister, and I can tell the shadow Minister that he would be treated akin to a Minister if he went to Kyiv. I am sure that it is in his plans to go.

I thank everybody who contributed. I will rattle through them in the time that I have left. I thank the hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) for his service in the military. We definitely need to consider the historical similarities, and particularly the fortress belt. As my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith) said, we need to remember the temporarily displaced people. I was with her in Vinnytsia, where we met with the university and with businesses.

My two vice-chairs on the APPG on Ukraine, the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) and my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West and Leigh (David Burton-Sampson), made excellent speeches. The right hon. Member talked about his historical experience of being on the Black sea, the first wave of Russian aggression, the nuclear crisis and the concerns around Zaporizhzhia. My hon. Friend talked about Mariupol, which was the bravest defence in the Ukrainian war.

The right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), who often speaks alongside me in these debates, talked about the historical parallels of non-recognition. As I am sure he knows, my mother was from Lithuania and born during that era. My hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Tim Roca) talked about military aid. We need to ensure that the Ukrainians get sufficient military aid. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) contributes tirelessly to these debates. His work on religious freedom is hugely important. We should remember that non-Orthodox religious sites were attacked and clerics abducted. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) made an important point about NATO. NATO’s clear position is non-recognition, and we need to hold the coalition of the willing together in its entirety to ensure that there is no recognition.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of non-recognition of Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.