Keir Starmer accused Vladimir Putin of treating his people like “bits of meat to fling into the grinder” and questioned how Russia can show its face at the UN.
Mr Starmer said Russia was responsible for “colossal human suffering” and – as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council – was behind the “greatest violation of the (UN) charter in a generation”. Facing down Russia at the UN Security Council, the Prime Minister said: “The UN Charter – which they (Russia) sit here to uphold – speaks of human dignity. Not treating your own citizens as bits of meat to fling into the grinder.”
“I wonder how Russia can show its face in this building,” he added. “There must be accountability. Aggression cannot pay. Borders cannot be redrawn by force. Russia started this illegal war. It must end it – and get out of Ukraine.” He
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POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told world leaders that Russia was planning to attack Ukrainian nuclear power plants – risking “nuclear disaster”. He told the UN “radiation does not respect state borders”, as he steps up calls for support to end the war.
Russia “can’t defeat our people’s resistance on the battlefield” so it is “looking for other ways to break the Ukrainian spirit” with strikes on its energy grid, he said. President Zelensky is expected to present his “victory plan” to Joe Biden shortly, which includes calls for permission to fire Western gifted long-range missiles into Russia.
But Mr Starmer dampened expectations of a breakthrough, saying he expected discussions in New York about how Ukraine could defeat Russia would be more broad than just weapons.
He told reporters: “I don’t think (the) victory plan will be about a sole issue like long-range missiles, it will be about a strategic, overarching route for Ukraine to find a way through this and succeed against Russian aggression.”
It comes after Foreign Secretary David Lammy accused Putin of running a “mafia state” and likened him to a slave-owner in a fiery speech on Tuesday. “Your invasion is in your own interests,” he said in a direct address to the Russian President.
“Yours alone. To expand your mafia state into a mafia empire. An empire built on corruption.” Mr Lammy added: “I speak not only as a Briton, as a Londoner, and as a Foreign Secretary.
“But I say to the Russian representative, on his phone as I speak, that I stand here also as a Black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved, whose ancestors rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved.”Imperia ism: I know it when I see it. And I will call it out for what it is.”