Ukraine

Julie Minns Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) (Con)]

May I first join the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), in thanking the Secretary of State for Defence for the power of his words, and for the manner in which he has spoken for the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and not just for the Government? I do not think there is a Member of the House who would quarrel with anything he said, and the message that has to go out from this place is that we stand united with Ukraine.

There is a danger. In 2014 the Russians annexed Crimea. At the time, Russia was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and it was compelled to withdraw. In 2018 the Parliamentary Assembly, of which the Father of the House and I were both members at the time, voted almost overwhelmingly to re-admit the Russian Federation. The Baltic states, Georgia, Moldova and the United Kingdom fought that through the night—literally—in an unprecedented display of parliamentary unity, but we lost. We were beaten hands down. The following day, the Russian delegation was back in the Hemicycle in Strasbourg. I do not think it is stretching it too far to say that the message that we sent out was profoundly wrong and almost certainly influenced Putin’s belief that he could probably invade Ukraine with impunity.

It has been said over and over again, and absolutely rightly, that Ukraine is fighting for our democracy. If Putin were allowed to win, it would not stop there. Next would be Georgia, Moldova and then possibly the Baltic states. If that were to happen, NATO would be involved and we would probably have world war three, so the stakes are rather high. It behoves all of us to stand as firmly as we can, and to send out the message that “for as long as it takes” means for as long as it takes.

I want to follow on from the remarks made by the hon. Member for Coatbridge and Bellshill (Frank McNally), and to concentrate a bit of time on the diaspora—the expat Ukrainians living throughout Europe, and particularly in the United Kingdom. The Secretary of State said in his opening remarks that thousands of Ukrainians are yearning for the opportunity to return home. I am sure that is true, and he also went on to say that he hopes that there will be peace this year. Again, I do not suppose that anybody in the House or across the United Kingdom does not want the bloodshed to stop.

Ukraine has already sacrificed the largest part of a generation of its finest young men and women in armed conflict, as well as all the civilians who have suffered. Again, that includes the thousands of children, who have been referred to many times in this House, who have been abducted and are now being indoctrinated somewhere within the neo-Soviet Union. They have to be repatriated.

The Father of the House made the point, absolutely rightly, that peace cannot mean peace at any price if we are to honour the dead and those who have sacrificed so much in Ukraine in fighting for their democracy and their country, as well as for ours. Although the Secretary of State was right to say that there are thousands of Ukrainians yearning for the opportunity to return home, when that will actually be possible is a moot point. If there is a peace—and, please God, there will be soon—and on a sound basis, there will still be a phenomenal amount of reconstruction, in the centre and the east of Ukraine in particular, to be carried out before anybody has homes to return to. Depending on the nature of the deal, there will be people who either will not be able to return home because it is still occupied, or whose homes will have been so destroyed that physically there will be nowhere for them to go.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point about the reconstruction that will follow the peace, and one of those areas will be mine clearance. It is estimated that about a quarter of Ukrainian land is now mined, which means that Ukrainian farmers are literally farming on the front line. We should not underestimate how many decades it will take to clear the land of mines. Will he join me in both welcoming the funding from the Government to the HALO Trust for the work under way and paying tribute to the Ukrainian farmers?

[Sir Roger Gale]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to pay tribute to the farmers and to highlight the phenomenal difficulty of clearing mines. The HALO Trust has experience of that around the world, and it will take years, not months.

For all those reasons, I say to the Minister—I was going to say my hon. Friend—that this is a sensitive issue, but there are scores of Ukrainians living in the United Kingdom who regard the UK as home, because they have to: they have no choice. My wife and I have five young people whom we now regard as grandchildren, two in one family and three in another, ranging from teenaged down to the cot. Last weekend, a young lady—young in my terms—came to my surgery. She has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to go to college. Like so many other young Ukrainians of that age, she is now between a rock and a hard place, because she does not know how long she will be allowed to remain in the United Kingdom.

There are also professional people who cannot work here and would like to return home, but who need to be enabled to establish a proper professional life in the United Kingdom. I will give the Minister one example: Dr Olena Hubska, now a personal friend of ours, who is the mother of two of those children. She is a fully qualified dentist and has 16 years in practice as a hospital doctor, but the General Dental Council will not allow her to practise here, despite the fact that the country is crying out for dentists. I am told there are some 200 others like her with such qualifications. That is nonsense. Every school holiday, Olena returns to Kharkiv, where her mother is living in a bombed-out flat, so that she can treat children and frontline soldiers who otherwise cannot get dental care, but she is not allowed to practise here.

I do not want to put the Minister on the spot today, but I say to him that we must sort out the longer-term future for these people, who are not even classed as refugees—they are stateless and have no actual status in this country. We have generously, initially, made them welcome, but we have now reached the point where we have to take some decisions for the longer term. I would like the Minister to go back to his colleagues in the Department and the Secretary of State to take this to Cabinet, to say that we really have to recognise that, however sensitive the immigration issue is—as I of course understand—there is a group of people living in this country, contributing to our way of life now, culturally, as has been said earlier, who have to be regularised. They must have a pathway to settlement so that the young people can go to school and on to college, and can qualify and build lives here.

President Zelensky wants his people to return home, and we want them to be able to return home, but for the moment and for the foreseeable future that is not possible. So please, Minister, take that message away and see what can be done, working with the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary, to now regularise the position in the interests not just of them, but of the United Kingdom as well.