Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine has fled the country, the Foreign Secretary revealed today.
Melinda Simmons initially switched from the capital Kyiv to Lviv in the western part of the country, but she has now left altogether as bitter fighting rages, MPs heard.
Ms Truss told the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee: "Our ambassador has left Ukraine because of the serious security situation.”
The Foreign Secretary signalled she could back the creation of a special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.
Charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide can be brought against Russia even though it is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court.
However, the crime of aggression cannot be prosecuted against people from a non-ICC state - unless the UN Security Council makes a referral.
That cannot happen because Russia is one of the Council’s five permanent members and has a veto.
Committee chairman Tom Tugendhat asked Ms Truss if she believed a “new international tribunal should be set up to look into whether this is a war of aggression, to collect evidence of it being so and perhaps to charge those who began this war”.
Ms Truss said: “I am willing to look at it, yes.”
She also admitted Britain and allies grew complacent over Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
“Post-Cold War the West took its eye off the ball - defence budgets were cut, there was too much entering into trade and economic relationships,” Ms Truss said.
She accused “the West, the wider free world” of “taking its foot off the pedal, on abandoning a lot of the infrastructure we had in place during the Cold War and thinking that peace would be eternal, and that we could divert money onto other things, that we didn’t need to spend it on defence”.
Failure to deliver a stronger response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and backing separatists in eastern Ukraine paved the way for Moscow’s latest attack on Ukraine, she said.
“Becoming more dependent on Russia for oil and gas ignored the bad possibilities that could happen,” admitted the Cabinet Minister.
“There was a certain amount of turning a blind eye to what happened in Crimea, what happened in the Donbas region and we are now at a stage where the failure to act more decisively earlier has meant that we now face a greater cost in acting now.”
Countries need to wean themselves off Russia’s hydrocarbons and “all the free world need to rethink their economic dependence” on Putin’s regime, she told MPs.
Cash pumped into the Russian economy helped finance an overhaul and modernisation of its forces, she admitted.
The West “enabled the development of Russian hi-tech warfare, we essentially provided the funding” for Moscow to boost its military by buying Kremlin oil and gas - at the same time as slashing spending on their own Armed Forces, Ms Truss told the committee.
“There is no doubt that we have to cut off the supply of money into the Russian government - and the number one supply of money into the Russian government is hydrocarbons,” she said.
“That has to be part of the solution. It is why Putin has been able to fund the war machine, the army.”
