Ukraine — House of Commons, 2022-03-15
Topic: International Affairs
Andrew John Bower Mitchell (Conservative, Centre-right): I draw the House’s attention to my outside interests as set out in the register It is a huge pleasure to follow the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) and the very sensible speech she has just made, which underlines the unity across the House in facing this extraordinary and unjustifiable aggression by a member of the permanent five at the United Nations, tearing up 75 years of the international rules-based system and in contravention of everything that the UN has said and stood for and of the growth of international law Everyone in the House and the country will be haunted by the plight of the refugees. It is impossible to find words to set that out or explain it, but for many of us it will be the little girl, aged 10, terrified, her eyes wide with fear, clutching her cat as she came over the border from Ukraine. We must hope, as William Hague so eloquently said in The Times today, that "a hollow structure…will lose its reputation and respect very quickly when its thieving and selfish reality is revealed to its own people. That may take months or years, but Putin’s henchmen would be well advised to start thinking about their escape route to Pyongyang." The whole House will agree with our former colleague. The Chinese today referred to the invasion as an "irreversible mistake", and many of us this afternoon have saluted the extraordinary bravery within Russia of ordinary people standing up to this bullying maniac. I strongly support and congratulate the Government, particularly the Ministry of Defence, on giving the Ukrainians hope and some military muscle without starting world war three and on co-ordinating economic sanctions and the economic isolation of Russia across the western world and across European states I mainly want to talk about the humanitarian position, on which there is no need to look in our crystal ball; we can read the book of what happened in Syria. The House may recall that Jo Cox and I co-chaired the all-party parliamentary group for friends of Syria and held more than two emergency debates in the House If we want to know what the Russians will do to those cities in great peril in Ukraine, we need look no further than what they did in Aleppo, one of the great cities of the world, which, as the Nazis did in Guernica in 1937, they bombed back to the stone age. There were also indiscriminate attacks on hospitals. Let us imagine the bravery of the men and women, doctors and clinicians, who are working in hospitals in Ukraine and who know from Syria exactly what fate may await them. There were also massive breaches of the rules of war and of international humanitarian law Let us make no mistake about the danger of the use of chemical weapons, which was greatly enhanced when President Obama told the Russians that, if they used chemical weapons, they would cross a red line and action would be taken yet, when they did cross that line, no action was taken. Let us also remember the sheer numbers of people who were on the move. In Syria, 5 million people were internally displaced and 5 million people were outside in the surrounding countries—that is 10 million people out of a population of 20 million. That shows the scale of what may now face us The critical thing in humanitarian terms is that there should be a seamless approach where all of Europe and NATO share the burden fairly with the frontline states, whether they are in or out of the European Union.