Ukraine

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I start with a couple of declarations of interest. I am one of the elected vice-presidents of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and I work very closely with our five sister parties in Ukraine. I am also a former trustee of UNICEF UK, and I am vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Fire Safety and Rescue.

It is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. His decades of experience and strategic view have given us a hopeful speech about changing mindsets. The House should be grateful for that. The only issue I have is that one other factor is beginning to emerge, which is the Russian people themselves. However downtrodden they are, however much protesters are imprisoned, however much Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation and our sister party Yabloko do what they can in a country where it is almost impossible to speak up, it is now becoming clear that the Russian people are concerned about the number of deaths and beginning to understand that things are not as Putin has told them. Let us hope that that continues to grow as well.

I look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Soames. I had the honour of meeting his mother on a number of occasions over 30 years at Churchill College. It is delightful to welcome yet another Soames into your Lordships’ House.

I will focus on the extraordinary cross-party political co-operation, not just in the UK and Ukraine but in many parts of the western world that have come together to try to turn the tide on Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. I will illustrate that with one example, that of removing landmines. I will also focus on Ukrainian children abducted and forcibly adopted by Russia.

But first, I echo the points my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed made. Our Ukrainian friends are extremely keen that the UK looks at Russian assets, not just those of oligarchs and individuals who are in power but those of the nation itself. I gather that £58 billion of central Russian assets are held in London. We need to go beyond targeting just individuals because at some point, I hope very soon, we will have to find the resources to help Ukraine rebuild. It and the West should not pay for that; the aggressor should pay.

I mentioned that I work with our sister parties in Ukraine. There are five, but two are particular key: Servant of the People, or Sluha Narodu, which is obviously in power and led by Zelensky, and Golos, which is led by Kira Rudik as leader of the opposition. The example of cross-party co-operation is so evident when you talk to any MP in the Ukrainian parliament, because one thing they all do is come together. Their debate in parliament usually universally accepts that there is one priority role. Kira, who is also a vice-president of ALDE alongside me and has become a friend, uses her role as an international ambassador to go wherever she is asked by her country to speak about its priorities and concerns. She is an example to us all.

It was Kira who, in May last year, contacted me to ask whether the UK could provide support for landmine clearance and ensure it arrived as soon as the Russians had vacated Donetsk and Luhansk, which they were just in the process of doing. I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, and to Amanda Milling, whom I wrote to at the time to ask whether we could ensure that specific resources were available. I have worked somewhat with MAG over the past year. The one thing that still concerns it, despite everything that has gone extremely well, which I will come back to in a minute, is that there will still need to be considerable mine-clearing resource available in Ukraine as we move forward. The Government have done the right thing and not let it impact on landmine clearance that the UK funds elsewhere in the world. Will the Government continue to ensure that there are enough resources? I would like to point out the level of mine clearance elsewhere every year. My noble friend Lord Purvis spoke about the issues in southern Africa, and the numbers there are astonishing. In Somalia I think it is about 70,000 and in Myanmar it was 98,000 landmines last year alone. The numbers across the world are good, and this is something that the UK should be proud to do.

The key issue that I wanted to raise is that, now that the Mines Advisory Group and the Halo Trust are in touch with Ukraine, they have managed to work with a united Ukrainian Government. Every department that had to give permission to work with them has done so and did so quickly, within three to four weeks, and they are training their own Ukrainian people now to clear mines as well, which is something that both MAG and the Halo Trust do in every country that they go into. We know that the number of Russian attacks mean that there is a significant and serious problem that is continuing to grow with landmines and other things that can injure people, so I hope the Minister can give some reassurance on that.

My other focus is on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I note that Russia signed it in 1990 just after it was first launched, so there are other things that Russia has signed but chosen not to be party to. Articles 6, 11, 19, 21 and 38 are vital when it comes to protecting the children of Ukraine, both in terms of simply being victims of war in areas where there are attacks and, particularly, in relation to children who are being adopted. Article 21 says that adoption must be safe and lawful, and that every adoption must prioritise the child’s best interest. That has not happened. It is now thought that over 13,000 children were forcibly removed from Ukraine by Russia, and some 2,000 are completely untraced. It is astonishing that the Russian media have promoted the fact that they were proud to take those children from those regions, saying:

“More than 1,000 babies from the liberated Mariupol have already found new families … More than 300 babies are on temporary maintenance in specialized institutions of the Krasnodar Territory and are looking forward to meeting their new families”.


This is the straightforward abduction of children of one nationality who are then moved to another country. It must be stopped. When the time is right, these children must be reunited with their birth families.

I shall end on some of the issues in UK civic society, where extraordinary things have happened. First, we need to pay tribute to those families who have hosted Ukrainian families; to the many schools that are taking in, right from day one, Ukrainian children and making sure that they can settle in; and to the many Ukrainian families working together to make sure that Ukrainian heritage is upheld and supported while the children are abroad, not just in the UK but elsewhere. I have seen friends running vans of goods, sometimes specialist goods such as pharmaceutical goods, to Ukraine as they are needed. As a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group, I find it notable that the national fire chiefs have had four convoys of firefighting equipment, including fire engines, that have already gone to Ukraine, and further trips are planned. These are not things that get national press in the way that day-to-day war does, but it shows us that in this country we have come together as best we can as ordinary people to try to play our part.

I was talking to Kira Rudik in the period between the Queen’s death and her funeral. I had just had a family dinner with my stepmother and my mother-in-law, both of whom grew up in the war, one in the Blitz and one in a northern city where there were daily bombings. Both of them said that the pictures from Ukraine were reminiscent of their childhood and that, in the early days of the Blitz, they all thought that things would end fast, but they did not. That is the big message from our own generation who have witnessed this at first hand. We must be there to help Ukraine every step of the way for however long this trial takes because we know that we can come out the other side of it—as we did—but we have to do so as a united world to stop Russia’s continued aggression.