Ukraine

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is quite right. He is a distinguished former soldier and he knows that truth is the first casualty. We have to make sure that we are telling people exactly what is going on. To the best of my knowledge, at the moment the Ukrainians are resisting much more strongly than some people had thought that they would. Who knows how long they can keep going? Let us hope that they can and let us encourage them to do so, but let us get the message out as well. That is our job.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister is absolutely right: we equivocated shamefully after Crimea; we were spineless. We must not be spineless now, because what will inevitably happen is that either the Baltic states, one of the members of NATO, or perhaps Sweden or Finland will feel the wrath of Putin next, and that will mean British action. Do we not need to try to set in train now a process whereby Putin himself ends up in the dock in a court? Norman Birkett, who was the alternate British judge at Nuremberg, said at Nuremberg that to

“initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Putin must be brought to a court of law and end his days in prison, must he not?

[The Prime Minister]

One of the most fascinating things about what Putin is doing is how close an analogy there is between his actions and those of Slobodan Milošević. We have exactly the same nonsense being peddled about the mystical union between Kyiv and Moscow as we did about Kosovo and Belgrade, and exactly the same aggression, and remember that Slobodan Milošević died on trial.