G20 and Ukraine

Andrew Mitchell Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I agree. This is clearly a really serious case. Any other party would want to investigate to assure itself of how this could happen. This is not a minor transgression; it has now been visited with a 10-year sentence because it undermines our country. Surely the Reform leadership want to know how that happened on their watch, and what other links there are between their party and Russia. No wonder they are Putin-friendly. How on earth could they respond to a situation like this? There is no point in standing up and saying that you support Ukraine if within your own party, you are pro-Russian.

[Sir Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

The Prime Minister’s role in marshalling European co-operation is essential and very welcome, but would it not be obscene and unconscionable for any country—indeed, one of the permanent five at the United Nations—to invade its neighbour and murder its citizens, and to get away with it and profit from it, let alone to rejoin the G7? Have we not seen this film before? Do we not know how it ends?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for raising this. That is why it is really important that we make the case for, and ensure that it is, a just and lasting peace—because we have seen this before. We have seen agreements brokered before without security guarantees, with the inevitable result that Putin will go again. That is why, in relation to all the principles I have been operating on, in setting up the coalition of the willing and in all my discussions, it has got to be a just and lasting peace. It has got to be one that actually deters Putin from doing this again, because we know that without that deterrence and those consequences, he has the ambition to go again, and he will go again, and we must guard against that.