Labour has renewed its calls for the UK to throw out the Russian ambassador in response to alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine, as Italy, Germany and France carried out a wave of diplomatic expulsions.
David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, said there should be no place for Andrei Kelin in the UK after the latest reports of atrocities by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.
Italy said on Tuesday it was expelling 30 Russian diplomats, after Germany kicked out 40 and France 35 in a wave of action.
However, Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, has not yet taken action against Russian diplomats, and the government failed to bring forward planned legislation over the last year to make it easier to expel unregistered foreign agents.
It has been argued by government sources that the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats over the novichok poisonings in Salisbury in 2018 has left few intelligence officers to take action against. But Lammy said the ambassador himself should be kicked out.
“The sickening actions committed by Vladimir Putin and his cronies in Ukraine undoubtedly amount to war crimes,” Lammy said. “There should be no place for Russia’s ambassador to parrot the regime’s lies or intelligence agents to continue their hostile activity in the UK. Alongside expelling Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council, we should set up a special tribunal to personally prosecute Putin and his gangster regime.”
Truss has called Kelin in to the Foreign Office twice in response to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. However, the Foreign Office has resisted calls for expulsions. Some MPs believe the UK may be obtaining high-quality intelligence from Russian diplomatic sources, leading to the reluctance to take action against them as a group.
On Monday a western official said: “A number of European partners have expelled Russian diplomats, principally intelligence officers. Because of all the action we took after Salisbury, we actually don’t have very many of that category of Russian in the embassy in London at the moment. So, while we keep it under review, we have no plans at the moment.”
