"The UK government is showing an increasing illiberal face, from the forced relocation of asylum seekers to Rwanda to their foolish policies against Russia. It looks like a desperate attempt to cover up the failure of relaunching their imperial dreams. It is shameful and dangerous," Paolo Raffone, a strategic analyst and director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels, told Sputnik.
The UK spent £2.3 billion ($2.95 billion) on weapons for Ukraine between April 2022 and March 2023, making London second to Washington in terms of Western military spenders for Kiev.
The UK "donated significant quantities of military equipment, ammunition and non-lethal aid" British Defense Minister Ben Wallace announced on Thursday.
What was left out of the scope of Wallace's triumphant speech is that the Kiev regime has been using Western "aid" to terrorize civilians of former Ukrainian regions which joined Russia last year in the result of democratic referendums.
Storm Shadow Missiles Target Civilian Areas
Incapable of waging the much-discussed counteroffensive, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been attacking civilian infrastructure of the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. To that end, the military has repeatedly used the Franco-British Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which boast a striking range of 250 kilometers (155 miles).
In May 2023, the British government announced that it had delivered Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, giving the Kiev regime new long-range strike capability.
Commenting on London's move, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev warned that "such actions are completely contrary to international decisions on arms exports, which prohibit the supply of weapons in cases where it is known that they can be used to carry out acts of genocide, damage civilian objects, the civilian population, and commit crimes against humanity."
List of Some Ukrainian Strikes
On May 12, at about 6:30 pm (GMT+3), combat aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force launched a missile attack on the Polypak polymer products enterprise and the Milam meat processing plant in the city of Lugansk.
A fire broke out in the Lugansk enterprises, causing damages to nearby houses. Civilians were injured, including six children.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, Storm Shadow air-to-air missiles supplied to the Kiev regime by the UK were used for the strike, despite statements from London that these weapons would not be used against civilian targets.
On May 15, the Ukrainians struck at Lugansk's dormitory area near the former aviation school and near the bus station. Per retired Lieutenant Colonel of the People's Militia of the LPR Andrey Marochko, the strikes were conducted with the use of Storm Shadow missiles.
"I can immediately assume that it was the Storm Shadow missile, since Ukrainian militants could not strike this area by any other means - we are at a considerable distance from the line of contact," Marochko told reporters. "They [the Armed Forces of Ukraine] could not terrorize us, they did not like this fact very much. With the help of these munitions, they want to sow panic among our population, among the residents of the LPR."
On June 9, the Ukrainian military likewise used Storm Shadows to attack the children's health camp "Dnepryany" in Genichesk district of the Kherson region.
"Another confirmation of the barbarism and inhumanity of the Kiev regime, controlled from London: the wreckage of a Storm Shadow rocket aimed at the Dnepryany children's health camp on the Arabat Spit. One rocket was shot down, but two nevertheless reached the target. As a result, one person died, another was injured", wrote Acting Governor of Kherson region Vladimir Saldo on his Telegram account on June 9.
Saldo stressed that the numbers and markings on the missile's wreckage left no doubts that these were the Franco-British long-range missiles delivered to the Kiev regime. Saldo highlighted the fact that the strike happened at the time when the summer recreational season for schoolchildren had already begun. "Rockets that bring death to children," the acting governor wrote.
On June 22, the Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out a strike on the administrative border between the Kherson region and Crimea. As a result of the missile attack the roadway on the Chongar Bridge, used by civilians to travel from mainland Russia to the peninsula, was heavily damaged.
On July 5, Storm Shadows were presumably used to attack the administrative building in Volnovakha, the Donetsk region, three civilians were injured.
How UK Has Failed to Stop Kiev From Killing Civilians Over 9 Years
Earlier, in May, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov shrugged off Kiev's promise not to use NATO-grade weapons against Russia's regions.
"As for the Crimea, Lugansk, Donetsk regions, Kherson and Zaporozhye, this is the territory of our country and we will defend it as we see fit," Danilov claimed while talking to reporters.
Besides ignoring the will of the people who voted to join Russia, Danilov's use of the term "defense" does not correlate with the Ukrainian Armed Forces strikes on civilian infrastructure. Since the beginning of the special operation, the Ukrainian forces have killed 4,546 civilians, including 106 children in new Russian territories.
At that time, the British government not only turned a blind eye to the extermination of civilians and children by the Ukrainian military but provided Kiev with weapons and special military training including in "urban conditions".
Remarkably, in late June UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace asserted to London's lawmakers that Storm Shadow missiles given to Kiev have had "a significant impact" on the battlefield in Ukraine. Needless to say, he did not specify the damage to the civilian population and infrastructure.
Since the West signaled its readiness to send long-range weapons to the Kiev regime, Russian lawmakers have been discussing the necessity to push back the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at a longer distance, so that they cannot attack civilian areas.
On June 13, President Vladimir Putin met with war correspondents covering the Russian special military operation and noted that if Kiev proceeds with attacks against Russian citizens, Moscow would consider forming a "sanitary zone" in Ukraine for the sake of security.
How UK Government 'Helps' Children in Ukraine
In order to shield children targeted by the Ukrainian shelling and missile strikes, Moscow kicked off an evacuation operation for civilians in liberated regions. Since February 24, 2022, Russia has welcomed over five million residents of Ukraine, of which more than 700,000 were children, as per Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's June 30 statement.
"I want to emphasize once again that the vast majority of these children arrived with their parents or other relatives, and only two thousand are pupils of orphanages in the DPR and LPR, who were evacuated along with the staff, with the educators of these institutions, they all remain within the structures that are orphanages", Lavrov stressed at the time, adding that 300 children were placed in Russian families for temporary guardianship until their parents arrived.
Nonetheless, the UK rushed to qualify Russia's humanitarian work as unlawful displacement and "eras[ing] their Ukrainian identity". According to the British government, "education in Ukrainian is denied" to these children. "Their new environments are linguistically and culturally entirely Russian," the report says, ignoring the fact that as per the last census, in 2001, and more recent surveys, the majority of Ukrainians speak Russian, with a third naming it their mother tongue. Most Russian-speakers are located in the current conflict zone.
To cap it off, the UK Foreign Office announced sanctions against Russia's International Children's Center Arket, a famous educational center for children on the Black Sea coast.
Homeless Ukrainian Refugees and Vulnerable Minors in UK
While chastising Russia's help to Ukrainian refugees and children, the UK cannot boast of being a champion in this respect. According to some estimates, the UK has so far accommodated around 200,000 Ukrainian refugees, which is fewer than many other European countries, let alone Russia which tops the list of states receiving Ukrainian asylum seekers.
To complicate matters further, UK hospitality has certain limits and the number of Ukrainian households with children who have become homeless has risen by 94% since November 2022 from 2,070 to 4,025 in May 2023, according to The Local Government Chronicle, a British weekly magazine. In general, the number of Ukrainian homeless households stood at around 6,000 as of May, as per the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities.
Even though the UK provides some educational options for Ukrainian children under the Homes for Ukraine Scheme and the Ukraine Family Scheme, this education wouldn't be in Ukrainian or Russian. Paraphrasing the British government's own statement, the UK's environment is "linguistically and culturally entirely" English.
Somehow, the British government also sought to get Ukrainian unaccompanied minors: the British media reported in June 2022 that London even changed laws to allow Ukrainian children to come to Britain "alone."
On July 19, DPR Senator Natalia Nikonorova, who is also a member of the parliamentary commission investigating Kiev's crimes against children, told Russian media about multiple instances of unlawful "evacuation" of minors from the territory of breakaway Donbass republics by the Kiev regime.
"In the process of liberation of the settlements of the [DPR and LPR] republics, more and more new facts are revealed (…) about the illegal evacuation of minors without any documentary consolidation," Nikonorova said.
Over 400 children from orphanage houses of Mariupol and Volnovakha vanished without trace after the Kiev regime's illegal "evacuation," per the senator.
Earlier, reports emerged saying that thousands of unaccompanied Ukrainian children found their way to Europe. The fate of these children raises questions. In July 2022, The Independent published an article eloquently titled "British paedophiles travelling to Poland ‘to target Ukrainian child refugees’". The newspaper reported citing the National Crime Agency (NCA) that at least ten known sex offenders traveled to refugee camps in Poland claiming they were providing "humanitarian assistance" to Ukrainian refugees. Per the NCA, there had been 5,000 unaccompanied Ukrainian minors at the time. However, according to some observers, this could be the tip of a bigger iceberg.
In addition to sex abuse, Ukrainian minors could fall prey to organ traffickers, Nikonorova said, stressing that those forcibly taken from Donbass orphanages by the Ukrainian authorities were previously subjected to medical examinations aiming at determining the condition of their organs.
It's Harder to Conceal Ukraine's War Crimes
While bragging about "successfully" arming the Ukrainian military, the UK government does not show the whole picture to its public.
The United Nations (UN) cannot but admit the Ukrainian military shelling of civilian infrastructure. To date, the UN has acknowledged 212 cases of attacks targeting schools and hospitals by the Kiev regime, according to Nikonorova.
It's getting harder for the collective West to conceal the Ukrainian war crimes, as truth is finding its way out, casting shadow on the Kiev regime's long-standing patrons.