Ukraine

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Heappey]

Absolutely. This is no time for gotcha-style comments such as, “You said you’d do this on Monday and you’ve not done it by Wednesday”; this is about making the right decisions to restore Ukrainian sovereignty as quickly as possible while ensuring that President Putin fails and the kleptocracy around him fails. This is behaviour that cannot be tolerated. As the Prime Minister has rightly said, this is behaviour that will be watched with great interest by other authoritarian regimes around the world. It is right that the west pauses and makes good, sound, strategic decisions as the western alliance and does the right thing to draw a line in the sand, saying we still believe in a rules-based international system and liberal, free democracies.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for his update this morning. I wish to express the solidarity of the people of Hull with the people of Ukraine at this appalling time, and the utter condemnation of the dictator Putin and his imperialist actions. I want to press the Minister a little more on war crimes. I am pleased to hear that they are being recorded and monitored. In particular, can he say something about the use of sexual violence in warfare and how the Government will record that? What exactly will happen next, so that I understand what the process will be?

[James Heappey]

I thank the hon. Lady for her important question. It is no consolation to the people of Ukraine, but the British armed forces have given a huge amount of thought to how we must operate in future conflicts, being mindful of women, peace and security, and the challenges that far too many women and children face in conflict broadly pursued between men. I am not sure that much regard is being given to that by the Russians, but I will come back to her if I receive any information to the contrary.

We told the Russian defence attaché yesterday about the work that has been done so far. We will continue to speak to him to make clear our expectations that all parts of humanitarian law and the Geneva convention should be adhered to. We will monitor that as best we can. As the hon. Lady will see from all of the open-source intelligence that is available on social media, this is a very different type of war from even Gulf war one and two. This is a social media age war, and the outrages are often there. Unfortunately, we cannot always believe what we see, so we are giving much thought to how we properly report and verify, and then make sure that people are held to account in due course.