I am absolutely committed to ensuring that all those appalling acts, and all the perpetrators, are held to account and I will be saying a bit more about that.
We have been resolute in our diplomatic response, and we are reopening our embassy in Kyiv. I thank our ambassador, Melinda Simmons, and her team for their courage and action. We are isolating Putin on the world stage. The United Kingdom led the diplomatic push to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, and we are using our presidency of the United Nations Security Council to expose Russia’s war crimes, and the appalling rape and sexual violence that we have seen used systematically in Ukraine. We gave President Zelensky a platform to detail the abhorrent crimes that have been committed by Putin’s forces, and we have launched the Murad code to set a global standard for evidence on sexual violence. We are working with 141 countries that voted to condemn Russia in the UN General Assembly, to toughen our stance.
Questions have been asked about what the future looks like, and the first thing that has to happen is for Putin to lose in Ukraine and fully withdraw the troops. We have to see the perpetrators held to account for the war crimes they have committed, and we must ensure that not only is Ukraine’s future security protected, but that Russian aggression of this nature can never happen again.