Chris Bryant
Main Page: Chris Bryant (Labour - Rhondda and Ogmore)
The Minister for Europe and North America (James Cleverly)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the situation in Ukraine.
Seven days ago, President Zelensky inspired us with his address to Parliament. This weekend, he was visiting wounded soldiers in hospital, leading from the front. We owe it to President Zelensky and the people of Ukraine to do our utmost to help them in their brave fight; we owe it to ourselves to stand up for security and stability in Europe; and we owe it to the world to keep the flame of freedom burning and to show that aggression does not pay.
In response to the unprovoked attack, the world has shown immense unity in standing up to Vladimir Putin, but we need to keep up the pressure. Our objective is clear: Putin must lose in Ukraine. We are doing this by cutting off the funding for his war machine, by providing weapons that the Ukrainians need to defend themselves and by isolating Putin on the world stage. The United Kingdom has been at the forefront of the international response, with a tough sanctions package and strong support, including defensive weapons and humanitarian aid. We will now enhance our work with allies to respond to Russia’s aggression.
We need to be strong to get peace. That is why we are building on efforts to cut off the funding for Putin’s war machine through sanctions. Today, I can announce that we will go further than ever before by hitting more than 360 more people complicit with Putin’s regime. They range from former President Dmitry Medvedev and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu to Putin’s propagandist Maria Zakharova. After today, we will have designated more than 1,000 individuals and entities under our Russian sanctions regime.
We are using our new powers under the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 to maximise impact. That would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts of colleagues across this Parliament to get the legislation through the House so quickly, which shows our collective determination to lead by example in punishing the Putin regime.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Minister is right that we are sanctioning a lot of people, but actually we name the people who are sanctioned, and then other people do the sanctioning by not engaging with them on a financial basis, not buying or selling properties and all the rest of it. At the moment, it is phenomenally difficult to find out from the Foreign Office sanctions list who is and is not sanctioned. For instance, I gather that it was announced last week that Members of the Duma were sanctioned, but they are still not on the Foreign Office website list, as far as I can see. I wonder whether there is a way of making the information far more readily available to the wider population.
We need to deal not just with the people who have £20 million houses, whom we have all heard of, but with the people who have £750,000 flats in London, bought with Russian dirty money—the many relatives of Abramovich and his ex-partners, for instance. Each one of them needs to be dealt with, and each one of those properties needs to be seized.
James Cleverly
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about ensuring that we give due publicity to the people, institutions and entities who have been sanctioned. I will ensure that the Department listens to his suggestion.
In December, we brought our G7 partners together in Liverpool to warn Putin that invading Ukraine would have massive consequences. We have followed through on that pledge. We have worked with our allies to cut off sectors of the Russian economy by targeting its defence companies, trade and transport sector, and by kicking banks out of the SWIFT financial system. We have led the way with our financial sanctions, targeting 10 Russian banks, and we have hit over £300 billion of Russian bank assets. All this amounts to the toughest sanctions package of any country. We will work with all our allies and encourage them to keep ratcheting up their efforts as well.
We will continue to provide lethal military aid to Ukraine. We were the first European country to send defensive weapons; we have already donated more than 3,600 next generation light anti-tank weapons and are now supplying Javelin missiles.
Chris Bryant
I asked the Minister about seizing assets, and this follows from the point made by the right hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison). If we do not seize assets, we will not be able to redeploy them towards the reconstruction of Ukraine. I suspect the Government will need further primary legislation to do that, but does my right hon. Friend agree that the House would stand ready to do that if necessary? There will otherwise not be a Marshall plan for Ukraine.
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend makes a good point about the historical enforcement of sanctions in this country, and of course the Opposition will stand ready to assist the Government if and hopefully when that legislation comes forward.
For more than a decade the Government have refused to clean up dirty Russian money. For any change to happen, Ministers have had to be dragged through the Lobby by Members on both sides of the House to rush through legislation that should have been passed years ago. We welcome the measures in the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022, which was passed yesterday, although many are too weak.
The job is only half done. We must complete the process of shutting down the London laundromat and ending the impunity of Russian oligarchs and the corrupt elites and criminals from across the world who use Britain as a base for hiding stolen money. That means completing Companies House reform, closing loopholes that allow overseas territories to be used as offshore tax havens to shield dirty cash from all around the world, and effectively enforcing our laws, as has just been suggested.
This war has caused the gravest humanitarian crisis on our continent in decades and the biggest movement of people in Europe since the second world war. Almost 3 million people have fled, the vast majority of them women and children, with little more than the clothes on their back.
Yesterday I met the Romanian ambassador, who told me of the efforts under way to help and support those fleeing the war. I pay tribute to communities throughout Europe, especially in Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and Moldova. Britain has a proud tradition of supporting those in need. Quite simply, we must do our part, but Government bureaucracy is still standing between desperate Ukrainians and the generosity and good will of the British public.
The war in Ukraine is a seismic shift. Our short-term responses must be components of a longer-term strategy. We must match deterrence with diplomacy, standing firm and resolute in defence of our allies while minimising any risks of a direct NATO-Russia confrontation. Avoiding miscalculation and miscommunication, we must have a clear-eyed assessment of how this war could be brought to an end so that a free and sovereign Ukraine can be rebuilt for her people. NATO is rightly avoiding direct conflict with Russia, but that means that the costs of this appalling war are being felt almost entirely by the Ukrainian people. Putin deserves absolute defeat in Ukraine and the Ukrainian people deserve absolute peace. So we must play our part in pushing for a negotiated settlement, a deal for peace based on terms accepted by the democratically elected Government of Ukraine. We must have not only strong and effective sanctions, but a clear notion of how they can be used to bring about the outcomes we seek.
While we push for an end to Putin’s monstrous aggression, as well as for peace, democracy and freedom for Ukraine, we must remain open to the Russian people. They did not choose this war, so we must expose Putin’s fabrications, distinguish between the Russian regime and Russia, and bolster the work of the BBC World Service and others to communicate with authoritarian states, as has been said. We must revise our defence plans for this new era, scrap the planned cuts to the Army and protect our energy security with a green energy sprint, to move decisively away from fossil fuels and on to clean, cheap, home-grown renewables instead. That will end dependency on Russia, accelerate our path towards net zero and cut off finance for Putin’s war machine.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I agree with every word spoken by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin).
All this was not only predictable but predicted repeatedly in this House by some of us, and we were shouted down for saying it. I said in 2014:
“We know how Putin reacts in a crisis…We also know about his territorial ambition.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 677.]
In that debate, hon. Members repeatedly trotted out the Russian line about the annexation of Crimea.
The Daily Telegraph, from 2007 to 2017, received £40,000 a month for “Russia Beyond the Headlines”, which was paid for by the Russian Government—it was Russian propaganda.
I am delighted that we now have a proper list of sanctions against people such as Nikolai Patrushev, Igor Sechin, Sergei Shoigu and Sergey Naryshkin. They should have been on the list right from the very beginning, as they are the very closest people to the Russian Government and they are completely entwined in the decision to invade Ukraine. But I am mystified at why some people are still missing from the list, including some of the broadcasters. Sergey Brilev regularly reports on the war in Ukraine for Rossiya 1 and always touts the Russian line. He has a £700,000 flat in Chiswick and a British passport, as well as a Russian one. Why on earth is he not on the list? Vladimir Solovyov, a 58-year-old who is also on Rossiya 1, is on the EU list but not on the UK one. Olga Skabeeva, a 37-year-old, is also on the EU list but not on ours. She is another person trotting out the Russian propaganda.
I do not understand why the former MP Rinat Khayrov, who is very close to the Defence Ministry, is not on the list. I do not understand why his close associate Rustem Magdeev is not, and neither is Khayrov’s daughter, Elsina Khayrova, who is unemployed but manages to have a £22 million mansion in Surrey, a £10 million art fund and £25 million spent on other properties around the UK. I do not understand why her husband, or perhaps soon to be ex-husband, Dmitry Tsvetkov is not on the list, and neither are so many others involved in Gazprom contracts. I do not understand why Abramovich’s properties that are owned through his “subsidiaries”, or rather by members of his family—Irina, Anna and Sofia—in Chester Square, Ebury Mews, Eaton Square, Cadogan Place, Hornbury Crescent, Tor Gardens, Fyning Hill and Goldring farm are not on the list. I do not understand why those have not yet been frozen as assets.
I do not know why Arron Banks is not on the list, either—even Isabel Oakeshott now thinks that he is an agent of influence for the Russian state. I simply point out that Nigel Farage received £548,573 from Russia Today in 2018 alone—this is from the Russian state.
We should not just be freezing assets; we should be seizing them. I do not think the Government have the power to do that. In normal times, we would not want them to be able to seize assets, but we need to have that power now. If we look at Chelsea football club, we see that it is in a kind of limbo at the moment. It ought to be able to flourish. I have no ill feeling against Chelsea football club—I am Welsh and I do not really care about football much. What I do care about is that the asset should be seized by the Government so that it can be spent on the reconstruction in Ukraine. If the Government do not take that power, they are not going to be able to do that.
That takes me to a point that I do not think the Foreign Secretary fully understood when she appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee last week, which relates to the issue of war crimes. We have undoubtedly seen war crimes committed in Ukraine already: the bombing of civilians when they are trying to escape as refugees through ceasefire corridors, the bombing of civilian and residential areas where there are absolutely no military installations, and the use of phosphorus weapons. I would argue that nowadays we should also be considering the use of cluster munitions as a war crime.
Many of those issues will be addressed by the International Criminal Court, but the one issue that is more difficult for it, because it is not a part of international criminal law at the moment, is the initiating of a war of aggression. In the Nuremberg trials, the British deputy judge declared that it was not just an international war crime but the ultimate international war crime, because it encompassed all the other crimes inside it. The danger is, of course, that the President, the person who makes the final decision—the ultimate decision—the person at the very apex of the decision, is the one most distant from the individual decisions that may be made. I hope that all the people I mentioned earlier as the main elite in the Russian Government, and Lavrov as well, will be held to account at the ICC, but we may have to change the law to make sure that Putin himself is brought to justice, and that is what we must do.
James Cleverly
With the leave of the House, I would like to conclude this debate on behalf of my hon. and gallant Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces, who was unfortunately detained in his Department at the opening of this debate. He has apologised to the Chair, and he has asked me to put on record his apologies to the House.
Earlier I outlined the Government’s main objective in this conflict, which is for President Putin to fail in Ukraine, and I set out the means we are employing to ensure that this is the case. With the addition of 360 people sanctioned today, the United Kingdom has now taken action against over 1,000 Russian individuals and entities. The new powers afforded to the Government under the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 have been put to use and will continue to be used over the coming weeks and months. Bank assets worth over £350 billion have been frozen. We have cut off key sectors of the Russian economy, including those essential to the Russian war machine, and we have rallied allies to remove Russia from the SWIFT banking system.
These sanctions are already biting. The Russian stock market has not opened since the start of the conflict, which I understand is the most prolonged closure of the Russian stock market since the Bolshevik revolution. The Kremlin is desperately trying to hold back capital flight, even from its sovereign wealth fund. Putin’s economy is now desperately exposed, and the elites around him feel the pain. They must tell him to stop the war, because the international consensus that now threatens their wealth will not be broken. This conflict stops when Putin decides it stops, and he should realise that it should stop now.
The international community has also moved to ostracise Russia from international sporting and cultural events. Russian and Belarusian athletes have been blocked from the Paralympics, and they are out of the World cup. Major western corporations are ceasing business in Russia, and the Bolshoi ballet will not be coming on its planned tour of the UK. Russian sports fans are left without international games to watch. The artists, athletes and performers blocked from performing overseas and the hundreds of people queuing in recent days for their last McDonald’s must be dismal signals to all Russians that Putin is damaging their country.
In his desperate attempts to control the news, Putin has inflicted on his own people the blocking of western social media platforms, and the highly connected and often influential Russian influencers must be devastated. As trivial as their tears may seem in the face of the suffering in Sumy or Kharkiv, their tears reflect the anger of a generation of young Russian people whom Putin does not understand and does not represent. They do not want the digital and cultural isolation from the west that he is now inflicting on them, and they should follow the brave example of Marina Ovsyannikova in challenging the repression of free speech and access to the world of online information. Putin is inflicting on this generation of millennial Russians a complete and total change of their way of life, and I have no doubt that they will want to push back.
Chris Bryant
I am full of praise for the Government for now being able to sanction 1,000 individuals, but will the Minister confirm two things? First, can he confirm that a large number of them can be sanctioned for only 56 days under our rules, because it depends on the Act that we passed yesterday? Secondly, can he confirm that we will proceed with many more sanctions? The tiny number of people around Putin may not be moved by all of this, but the people who have £750,000 tucked away here as their possible bolthole are terrified of what may happen, and we need to get to them as well.
James Cleverly
I can assure the hon. Gentleman and the House that we will continue applying sanctions to the Russians to continue the pressure on Vladimir Putin and to choke off the supply of money to his war machine.
The Government have announced nearly £400 million in both humanitarian and economic support to Ukraine. We are providing medical supplies, generators and other essentials. We are bringing Ukrainian children to the UK to continue their cancer treatment, and we have made the offer that the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine and other UK military medical facilities will be made available to injured Ukrainian service personnel. We will also welcome here Ukrainians fleeing from the conflict. We have put no cap on that number, and we have already seen that over 100,000 British families have offered to make their homes available to the refugees.