British spies to help link Russian leaders to war crimes in Ukraine

UK foreign secretary says team will travel to Poland in May

An aerial image of the GCHQ building in Cheltenham, Britain. Photo: Ministry of Defence

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British intelligence officers will help Ukrainian war crimes investigators establish the connection between leaders in Moscow and Russian commanders on the ground, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has said.

Ms Truss said that a team of UK war crimes experts would be travelling to Poland early in May to assist the Ukrainians in gathering evidence of Russian atrocities, including conflict-related sexual violence.

Speaking after talks with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Ms Truss said British intelligence would also help to hold Russian political leadership accountable.

“This is about collecting a wide range of evidence — witness statements, forensic evidence, video evidence,” she said.

“We will also use British intelligence to help show the link between what is happening on the front line and the Russian authorities, because it is important that everybody in the chain of command is held to account.”

She gave no further details, but the head of the Government Communications Headquarters spy agency Sir Jeremy Fleming last month suggested they had acquired intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s advisers were afraid to tell him what was really happening in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, western officials have said the Russian advance in the eastern region of Donbas — which is part-held by pro-Moscow separatists — was marked by an indiscriminate use of firepower against civilian targets.

“There is not a building in some of those villages which is being left intact after these artillery bombardments,” one official said.

In its latest intelligence assessment, the UK Ministry of Defence said Russian forces were paying a high price for limited gains.

“The Battle of Donbas remains Russia’s main strategic focus in order to achieve its stated aim of securing control over the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts,” it said.

“Due to strong Ukrainian resistance, Russian territorial gains have been limited and achieved at significant cost to Russian forces.”

Some western officials have said the Russians are at times advancing by as little as one kilometre a day.

While the Ukrainians were also suffering losses in the fighting, officials said they were not on the same scale as those incurred by the Russians and were not having the same impact on morale.

“Those losses on Russian forces we assess to be having a significant impact on the will to fight of wider Russian forces but the Ukrainian losses are not affecting the morale of the Ukrainian forces,” one official said.