Ukraine

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

I do agree with my right hon. Friend. We are looking at what we can do in the long term with those assets, and I am working very closely with the Treasury on that. We have also put asset freezes on 18 major Russian banks, and we would like to see other countries follow us. We have barred over 3 million Russian companies from raising money on our capital markets.

What has been very important in all of these efforts is that they have been closely co-ordinated across the G7, with the EU and with other partners around the world, including the Singaporeans, the Australians and the South Koreans. We have also taken decisive action on trade. We have cut Russia off from World Trade Organisation terms. We have banned high-tech exports and we have announced a ban on all new outward investment into Russia.

However, we cannot stop here; we have to keep increasing the pressure. As was asked about earlier, we do need to stop the imports of Russian hydrocarbons, and we need a new wave of sanctions. We are working on that with our partners to make further progress and put further pressure on the Putin regime. There are some people who say that the west cannot afford this, but we simply cannot afford not to do it, because if we do not end Putin’s war in Ukraine and we do not see Putin lose, we will see even worse consequences for the whole of European security.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, and her clear commitment, which the House endorses and supports. It is important to have sanctions and armaments in place, and for there to be accountability for the atrocities that the Russians have carried out. We have all heard the stories—they are hard to take in and listen to: ladies abused at levels that are hard to understand, children shot, homes bombed, and pregnant women killed. There has to be a system of accountability, and every one of those Russian soldiers who carried out those atrocities, and every one of their leaders and those above them, right up to Putin himself, must be held accountable. I know the Secretary of State is committed to that, but can we have it on the record today?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I am absolutely committed to ensuring that all those appalling acts, and all the perpetrators, are held to account and I will be saying a bit more about that.

We have been resolute in our diplomatic response, and we are reopening our embassy in Kyiv. I thank our ambassador, Melinda Simmons, and her team for their courage and action. We are isolating Putin on the world stage. The United Kingdom led the diplomatic push to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, and we are using our presidency of the United Nations Security Council to expose Russia’s war crimes, and the appalling rape and sexual violence that we have seen used systematically in Ukraine. We gave President Zelensky a platform to detail the abhorrent crimes that have been committed by Putin’s forces, and we have launched the Murad code to set a global standard for evidence on sexual violence. We are working with 141 countries that voted to condemn Russia in the UN General Assembly, to toughen our stance.

Questions have been asked about what the future looks like, and the first thing that has to happen is for Putin to lose in Ukraine and fully withdraw the troops. We have to see the perpetrators held to account for the war crimes they have committed, and we must ensure that not only is Ukraine’s future security protected, but that Russian aggression of this nature can never happen again.