Ukraine Update

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to point out the Russians’ woeful performance. I do not celebrate the loss of anyone’s life, and when I see the huge casualty rates of Russian soldiers, I think, as a former soldier, that it is a disgrace and a betrayal of those young men. It is hard to have sympathy when clearly it is not just the generals who are engaged in the war crime and butchery that we have seen, but mothers and wives in Russia are left behind because the arrogance of generals, poor performance and corruption has led many of those young men to their deaths.

On the hon. Gentleman’s point about mercenaries, yes, we see evidence of the Wagner Group now being actively deployed in Ukraine. We have seen some free Syrian fighters. We have seen media reports around Chechnya volunteers. The Wagner Group is a pain and a pest globally used—deniably, apparently, but it is not really that deniable—as an arm of the Kremlin. We have seen it in Africa. We see it in Mali now. We have seen it in Libya and elsewhere. The international community needs to come together to deal with the Wagner Group because whatever happens in Ukraine—its members are not getting very good kit and they are being some of the first to die, so it is not a great recruiting advert for it—it is going to be a problem that we have to deal with.

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I commend the Secretary of State for the actions he has taken to help Ukraine. In history, this will be seen not just as war crimes but as a genocide. Will he work with me to persuade the Foreign Office that, although obviously different from the Holodomor in the 1930s, this will be seen as a genocide in the same way?

[Mr Wallace]

What is really important on the accusation of both genocide and war crimes is that it does not need a politician to make that allegation. We are lucky in this part of the world to have the International Criminal Court, courts in the Hague and independent investigators who are right now collecting evidence and will be able to point a finger without any favour or political agenda. That is a really important difference between us and them. The Russians would love politicians in the west to be standing up and pointing fingers because then they can say, “You would say that, wouldn’t you?” I want to see our respected judiciary and our law enforcement agencies gathering the evidence and then putting it to the people who politically we all think are clearly responsible for many of the problems in Ukraine.