The Speaker of the House of Commons stepped off a train in Kyiv last week to be met by Ruslan Stefanchuk, his counterpart. The Ukrainian threw his arms around Sir Lindsay Hoyle, whom he has met several times, including in London. Their relationship has warmed as the war has gone on. When they first met, Stefanchuk would refuse food because of a fear of being poisoned by the Russians.
The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, the single-chamber equivalent of the Houses of Parliament, Stefanchuk is a larger-than-life character whose good humour can mask the gravity of the challenges facing his country.
On the morning that Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2022, he was rushed to the Mariinskyi Palace, the official residence of the president. Under the constitution he would have taken over if the Russians had succeeded in their reported assassination attempts on President Zelensky.
Since then he has occasionally been touted as a successor to Zelensky, most notably by President Putin who repeatedly suggests that the Ukrainian leader lacks legitimacy.
But Stefanchuk, who was one of the authors of Zelensky’s winning 2019 election programme, has remained a loyal ally of the president and defended the postponement of elections until the war is over.
• Ukraine war live: two Chinese citizens captured, says Zelensky
On Friday Moscow delivered the latest grim reminder of the existential stakes that Ukraine faces while peace talks are in the balance. After western leaders accused the Kremlin of slow-balling ceasefire negotiations, a Russian missile slammed into a playground in Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky’s home town, killing at least 18 people, nine of them children.
Four days earlier Hoyle and a delegation of parliamentary leaders from 19 European countries joined Zelensky and Stefanchuk at St Andrew’s Church, Bucha, 20 miles west of Kyiv, to mourn the most notorious atrocity of the war and commemorate the third anniversary of the liberation of the city.
As part of the delegation, codenamed Operation Puffin, Hoyle became the first British Speaker to visit an active war zone since Douglas Clifton Brown travelled to Normandy in 1944 in the wake of the D-Day landings.
Russian troops occupied Bucha in the early days of the invasion, remaining for about a month. When Ukrainian forces regained control, they uncovered mass graves and documented thousands of war crimes against civilians, including executions, rapes and torture.
At the church there is a memorial wall of plaques that contain 509 names. Some squares remain blank because there were 43 unidentified bodies unearthed from shallow graves and reburied in the town cemetery. Opposite is a sign that lists the people still missing. There are 33 civilians in Russian captivity and a further 23 unaccounted for.
Guards trained their guns on nearby flats as they checked for snipers. Zelensky and his wife Olena laid red lanterns at the foot of the memorial wall. Hoyle’s international delegation and bereaved families followed them. They included Alla Nechyporenko, 52, whose husband was shot dead at a Russian checkpoint, and Tetiana Popovych, whose son is among those missing.
After a moment of silence and with the families still weeping, Zelensky and his entourage left. He never stays anywhere for long because of the threat to his safety.
Shortly afterwards at a nearby art gallery, which had been turned into a conference centre, Zelensky reappeared to open the Bucha Summit.
Addressing the precarious state of ceasefire talks, the president called for a “lasting peace with dignity”. “And what does this mean — with dignity?” he asked. “It means that Russia should neither benefit from nor be rewarded for this war and should not escape rightful accountability for what it has done. There can be no normalisation of evil, meaning no simple return to the attitude that existed before towards what we all see now, towards this kind of Russia.”
In comments that will be interpreted as an appeal to Trump to end his appeasement of Putin, Zelensky said: “More than 183,000 crimes related to the aggression of the Russian Federation have already been documented. And this is even without access to a significant part of the temporarily occupied territory of our state … Among all this are thousands of extremely brutal atrocities. Executions of prisoners, executions of civilians, rape, torture.”
He added: “No one in Europe would want their children, God forbid, to be in the vicinity of these Russian criminals. Please remember that Bucha is not [just] somewhere in Ukraine; it is something that can happen in any European country if our unity does not work now to genuinely hold Russia accountable for this war.”
Moscow rejected a US proposal in March, agreed by Ukraine, for a 30-day ceasefire. The warring sides then agreed to a pause in attacks on energy infrastructure, which each accuses the other of violating.
Efforts to end the war remain under way. At a Nato meeting last week European foreign ministers accused Putin of thwarting a proposed peace deal. Military chiefs from the French and British armed forces travelled to Ukraine to engage with the Ukrainians over plans to deploy a “reassurance force” in the event of a ceasefire.
Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the British chief of the defence staff, said at the weekend summit that discussions included “how we can build on the formidable capabilities of the Ukrainian army and put them in the strongest possible position to deter Russian aggression”.
John Healey, the defence secretary, added that the so-called coalition of the willing “will continue to ramp up our military planning, exploring the air, sea and land forces that could support a lasting peace in Ukraine”. The UK recently helped to raise an extra €1.5 billion (£1.3 billion) for military aid.
At the Bucha Summit, Hoyle was the first of the European delegation to address the conference, declaring: “This is a war Ukraine did not start and did not want.”
He was followed by the Speakers from the European parliament, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Spain, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, who all voiced their support for Ukraine and called for Russia to be punished for the invasion.
Beyond Bucha, it is hard to avoid the huge effect the war has had on the country: the people with amputated limbs, the parks largely bereft of children. One of the Ukrainian aides who joined the delegation spoke about the toll of the war on her family. Her husband had returned home from two years on the frontline. Having seen most of his friends killed, he was struggling to return to family life and suffered night terrors.
Later at a hotel close to the Bankova, Ukraine’s equivalent of Downing Street, Stefanchuk could barely disguise his impatience at the Trump administration’s forgiving approach to the Kremlin.
He said: “The president proposed, with the negotiation with our American partners, an absolutely unlimited ceasefire. And we’re ready for 30 days; we are ready to do it. Putin said, ‘OK but this, but that’. And now we see for one week, every night, Russia continues bombing Ukrainian citizens, Ukrainian hospitals, even Ukrainian restaurants.
“You see, they do everything to ruin Ukraine. It is not a ceasefire; it’s like a gambling with Trump, with the US administration. They [the Russians] say yes they are ready for peace but then they attack Ukraine.”
Addressing concerns that Trump could be preparing a deal that would cede territory to Moscow, Stefanchuk said Ukraine did not need “peace at any price”. “Without territorial integrity, it’s not peace,” he said. “Without bringing back the stolen Ukrainian children, it’s not peace. It would be like enslaving our future and would be the kind of compromise where Ukraine loses and we don’t need it. We need a just and lasting peace.”
The chairman said the only language Putin understood was “the language of force and threats”. “It’s very important that America must understand that Putin is a liar,” he said.
Amid claims that Trump could impose secondary tariffs of 25 per cent to 50 per cent on buyers of Russian oil if he feels Moscow is blocking his efforts to end the war in Ukraine, Stefanchuk urged the West to introduce a sanctions package that can “break” Russia. He added that seizing £300 billion of Russian assets frozen since the start of the war should be part of the response.
“Sometimes people say ‘Oh, maybe let’s ratchet up the sanction pressure’. I said, we don’t need any new pressure …. we need one sanction. But it must be a real big pressure for Putin, economic pressure that can break him.”
Last week Putin suggested Ukraine could be placed under a form of temporary administration to allow for a new election that could oust Zelensky. A presidential election due last year was suspended in line with martial law, which was introduced in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
The Kremlin has demanded the ballot as a condition of a ceasefire deal — a point that has been repeated by Trump.
In recent days there has been a fresh flurry of speculation that elections could be held as early as the summer, with Zelensky’s popularity soaring in the polls after his clash with Trump in the Oval Office in February.
Stefanchuk, who has previously said Ukraine needs “bullets not ballots”, said Zelensky had nothing to fear from an election and blamed Putin for the delay in holding one.
“Putin wants to change President Zelensky but he can’t find how to do it. But we have no question [in] Ukrainian society about President Zelensky. The level of support in the president is now near 70 per cent,” he said.
“During martial law we can’t do any election, that’s absolutely normal. How can the Ukrainian soldiers who are fighting, vote? How can those Ukrainian citizens abroad participate in this election? We need a democratic election which will be recognised as a democratic election in the whole world. But everyone must understand that Ukraine can’t have an election, not because we don’t want one but because of Putin, because of this war, we can’t have an election.
“And that’s the main reason. But as the Speaker of Ukrainian parliament I want to say that after martial law is lifted, there will absolutely be a democratic election.”
At the conclusion of the 12-hour visit, Stefanchuk gave Hoyle a stuffed puffin toy in reference to the codename of the visit.
As the delegation arrived back at Kyiv station late in the evening, another train pulled in, bringing home wounded soldiers from the frontline. As the ambulances queued up to take them to hospital, Hoyle boarded the train to Poland.
“Whatever people’s views are of Donald Trump, what he has done has shaken Europe … and brought Europe together,” he said.
“[Zelensky] knows the UK is that great ally for Ukraine and that’s why that relationship works well. And of course, parliament in the UK is a difficult place. There’s always anger, there’s always disagreement, except on one issue: Ukraine.
“It bonds us, it binds us together. There is no political division. And that’s why it’s so important to ensure that we let them know how we feel and what we can do to support them.”
