Emily Thornberry

I have been complaining at home recently because the heating broke down, and I felt that was not being taken seriously by my other half. It was minus 1°C, I was really cold and I had been moaning about it for a week. Then it was pointed out to me that right now in Ukraine, in Kyiv, it is minus 12°C, although it feels like minus 16°C, and overnight it will be minus 17°C. To stop myself moaning, I have put the temperatures in London and in Kyiv on my phone. I keep remembering that in Kyiv ordinary men and women are having to battle against the cold, and their infrastructure is being deliberately attacked by Putin to try to undermine their morale. What happened on Monday night? There were 293 drones and 18 missiles in a bombardment. Air defences shot down 240 drones and seven missiles, but there was damage to critical civilian infrastructure in Kyiv and across Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv and Donetsk. There are now several hundred thousand households without any power or heating. There are 500 high-rise tower blocks where people are really cold, and they have acute shortages of electricity. The Russians are doing this on purpose. This is not proper warfare. This is such a basic thing—you are not supposed to target civilians when you are at war; it is against the law. When you are at war, you are at war, so go for the combatants; do not go for the children, nursery schools and housing estates. Do not bomb blocks of flats. That is not right or proper; it is illegal, immoral and wrong. The people are exhausted. They are about to hit their fourth year of being at war with Russia, but what is so amazing is the strength, focus, fortitude and bravery of these people, which has absolutely hit me in the heart when I have talked to Ukrainians. They are absolutely determined to keep their country Ukrainian, and they will not allow the Russians to win. No matter how hard it is, how cold it is or how many people are lost, they will continue to fight. They stand resolute, and we stand with Ukraine and with those brave people. On the Foreign Affairs Committee, we have had the honour of not only visiting Ukraine, but having a number of meetings with the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Committee. Its members have varied over the years. During the most recent meeting, the chair was the only person we could see. I joked about it to start with—I was going, “They ought to turn the lights on.” What an idiot! They do not have any lights or any power. The members were talking to us from their cars, because they could put on the heating and a light in their car and talk to us that way. That was how we had a meeting with the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Committee, but the members of the Committee showed up and told us what they had to say. We stand with Ukraine—this bravery! There are many things that we can do. I am really encouraged to hear that we are bolstering the work that we need to do when it comes to the shadow fleet. If anybody does not understand it, the shadow fleet is a fleet of ageing ships of obscure ownership that are uninsured and often environmentally unsound. They are being used to transport sanctioned Russian oil products to get around the oil price cap. I hope that we can find legal grounds for deploying military assets against the shadow fleet under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 and do insurance spot checks on false-flag ships, some of which were expelled by the countries for which they used to wave the flag and claim they came from. Some of those countries do not even have a shipping register, yet the ships still claim that they belong to those countries. If the ships are not insured, we can really take action, and I am glad to hear that we are going to step that up. That sort of sanction busting must stop.