Ukrainian MPs have called on UK foods giant Marks and Spenser to pull out Russia, claiming that companies still trading with Moscow are taking “blood and rape money”.
Four Ukrainian parliamentarians are due to meet Boris Johnson and talk to Nicola Sturgeon on Thursday with the message that the West must do more for their besieged country.
The Scottish First Minister is expected to provide more humanitarian aid for Ukraine, having already pledged £4 million to the country and over £1 million to charities working with refugees.
The four MPs gave harrowing accounts of rape being used as a weapon of war and of friends and relatives who are being caught in Russian bombardments of cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol.
Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukraine MP, told journalists in Westminster that they had reports of vulnerable women being raped and killed by invading Russian soldiers.
She said: “These women are the ones who usually are unable to get help, we are talking about senior citizens” who, she added “are
executed after the crime of rape or have taken their own lives”.
“The main problem is that victims and families do not have the strength or capacity to come forward.”
”We call on the British government to provide support inside the country to give assistance to the families of victims so that first and foremost so that they get the proper assistance and these crimes can be documented for a special international tribunal at the Hague.”
Maria Mezentseva MP, a member of President Zelensky’s Servants of the People party, said she had not been back to Kharkiv in a month.
She said: “As I sit here I’m receiving the best messages on my desk that 20 tonnes of food has just arrived from western Ukraine for people who have spent two weeks in bomb shelters”
Stewart Macdonald MP, the SNP defence spokesman who organised the tour for the MPs, said it was staggering to reflect that a just over a month earlier he had been sitting at dinner in Kiev with the same women.
Alona Shkrum MP described Vladimir Putin as a “new Hitler” and said he was intent on causing wordlwide panic by targetting nuclear waste stores in Ukraine.
She said: “My message to the Russian people that you fought Nazi evil 70 years ago and now you have created a new Hitler.”
She added: “Right now Children has been deliberately shot and because Putting has given order to create as much human terror as possible. Russians have created this new Hitler and they need to start stopping him also. They need to start listening they need to start asking questions where the soldiers are going to?”
She also praised the UK response to the crisis, saying:”“We came specifically to the British Parliament because you guys, you know, you faced it already in the Second World War. You had Churchill sitting in the shelter here in the basement as Zelensky is doing right now.
“You had your Parliament fight to the end as we are doing right now. You understand the situation, you’ve been supporting Ukraine very bravely.”
M&S has 48 shops in Russia but they are operated by a franchise business in Turkey called FiBA Group.
The company said it has suspended shipments to FiBA’s Russian business due to “the unfolding humanitarian crisis following the invasion of Ukraine”.
M&S said it is providing £1.5 million in support for the UN Refugee Agency and UNICEF including donating 20,000 coats and thermals for families.
The MPs also condemned French companies for staying in Moscow to fill the market gap left by other western businesses which have pulled out.
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