War in Ukraine: Third Anniversary

Olly Glover Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for his outstanding and comprehensive speech. Many people have died in this war so far, and United Nations figures suggest that at least 12,654 civilians have lost their lives and over 27,000 have been injured, with nearly 147,000 war crimes committed and 167,000 civilian buildings destroyed by Russia since the full-scale invasion began. Of course, the true death toll is likely to be far higher, as Ukraine and international bodies do not have access to Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine or areas on the frontline, most particularly the city of Mariupol, which was largely destroyed in the brutal Russian siege.

This is a tragedy that cannot continue, and yet amid so much darkness, a chink of light is how this war has shown the very best of our nation: our generosity towards Ukraine and how we have welcomed refugees and worked internationally to get co-operation against Russia. In my Oxfordshire constituency of Didcot and Wantage, the Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils have gone a long way to welcome and help refugees, and many families have hosted them, enabled by the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

The village of North Moreton, with a population of just 350, has hosted dozens of people, earning significant media coverage for its generosity. Many families have also been hosted in the small village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell. I want to give an example of the journey faced by one of those families. A mother and her two children, aged 17 and six when they came, had already fled Donetsk in 2014 in the first Russian aggression against Ukraine and then yet again in 2022 to the United Kingdom. The 17-year-old subsequently managed to get a place at the University of Nottingham and has started his studies. The mother took her six-year-old back to Ukraine last April, having missed her husband so much, and their UK host family are still in regular contact with her and her son.

In Didcot, Stanislav of the Help Ukraine Group Support, or HUGS, has collected enormous amounts of clothing, toiletries, tools and many other items and has sent huge pallets over to Ukraine. One place that received them was the Place of Kindness shelter for displaced families in Chernivtsi, which has helped shelter over 2,000 families, 147 orphans and 72 critically ill children. The same organisation collected and donated laptops to the Reading-based Ukrainian School Lastivka to enable children to get online and gain IT literacy.

I want to say a little about why I care so much about the Ukraine war, beyond the obvious reasons. I have a Polish mother, and Poland is a country that has also hugely suffered under Russian oppression in the past and retains a genuine fear of that nation to this day. This war matters to Ukraine and to Europe, but it also matters specifically to us. We hoped that Russia would stop after its 2008 invasion of Georgia—it did not. We hoped that Russia would stop after annexing Crimea in 2014—it did not. We hoped that Russia would stop after years of war in the Donbas—it did not. We hoped that Russia would stop after its brutal bombing of Syria in support of dictator Bashar al-Assad in the late 2010s—it did not. It is important that we learn from that and ensure that any peace we do have does not further embolden Russia.

Where do we go from here? Well, our communities and councils need long-term support to continue hosting refugees and looking after Ukrainians. Many hon. Members have already made eloquent remarks about that. We all want peace, but it has to be on Ukraine’s terms. There is so much talk at the moment of peace guarantees. We should remember that there have been such guarantees before—under the 1994 Budapest memorandum, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for supposed guarantees of its peace—so we cannot have cheap talk of guarantees now; we need to learn why previous ones did not work. Of course, we need European defence co-operation and investment in our armed forces. Many hon. Members have been optimistic that the United States will not turn permanently away from Europe, but in case that optimism is misplaced, we need to build up our defence forces and co-operate across Europe, using frozen Russian assets, so that we have the high-quality and competent defence force that our continent needs.

This war has brought huge suffering to the people of Ukraine, destroying communities, separating families and orphaning children. However, it has also shown the human spirit of justice, compassion and kindness to be a great unifying force. We must now work with our European allies to secure the freedom and prosperity of Ukraine and our continent.