Ukraine: Forcible Removal of Children

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Falconer]

My hon. Friend asks an incredibly important question. She is right to suggest that children are bearing the worst brunt of conflict. I was in Yemen this week, and I was appalled to see so many children with both moderate and severely acute malnutrition. That malnutrition is in very significant order created by the Houthis, who have restricted aid access into north Yemen and, indeed, detained UN aid workers and seized their offices. What the Russian forces do in Ukraine is seen elsewhere: it is seen by the Houthis and by militias in Nigeria. This country will stand up for an international rules-based order, which includes the protections that children are entitled to. We will continue to work to ensure the safe return of those 20,000 Ukrainian children. Six hundred of them have been identified by the mechanism that we co-fund and co-founded with the Ukrainians, and we will continue to work to ensure that all the remaining children are returned.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)]

I welcome the courage of the American people over many decades in standing up for our liberties and defending our freedoms, and I draw attention to the fact that this wonderful act of generosity has supported a US economy that has grown more powerfully, more capably and in more directions than any other economy in human history, making the United States the richest and most powerful country the world has ever known. Would the Minister agree with me that that stance on the side of truth and justice has genuinely been a great blessing for all free peoples, and that we should be standing up against people traffickers and child traffickers—by, for example, calling out folk like Jeffrey Epstein—but that seeing the world’s largest child trafficker almost getting away with it would be a betrayal of the great American values that have led to the happiness and prosperity of one of the wonderful countries of this world?

[Mr Falconer]

I thank the right hon. and gallant Member for his question. The US and UK have stood together on questions of European order ever since the second world war, and I am incredibly proud that it was a Labour Foreign Secretary who led on the creation of NATO. I know that our American friends continue to see questions of European security and order as being of the utmost importance, and that security and order cannot co-exist in a world in which territory is seized by force and children are abducted in exactly the way he describes.