David Lamy, the shadow foreign minister, said there should be no place for Andrei Kelin in the UK following recent reports of atrocities by Russian troops in Bukha, a suburb of Kiev. Italy announced on Tuesday that it had deported 30 Russian diplomats, after Germany expelled 40 and France 35 in a wave of action. However, Foreign Minister Liz Truss has not yet taken action against Russian diplomats, and the government failed to push through legislation last year to facilitate the expulsion of unregistered foreign agents. It has been claimed by government sources that the deportation of 23 Russian diplomats for the novichok poisonings in Salisbury in 2018 left few intelligence officers to take action against them. But Lammy said the ambassador himself should be prosecuted. “The heinous acts committed by Vladimir Putin and his friends in Ukraine are undoubtedly tantamount to war crimes,” Lammy said. “There should be no room for the Russian ambassador to parrot the regime’s lies or intelligence agents to continue their hostile activity in the United Kingdom. “As Russia’s expulsion from the United Nations Human Rights Council, we need to create a special tribunal to personally prosecute Putin and his gangster regime.” Trash twice called Kelin to the State Department in response to the Kremlin invasion of Ukraine. However, the Foreign Office resisted calls for deportations. Some MEPs believe that the UK can obtain high-quality information from Russian diplomatic sources, leading to a reluctance to take action against them as a group. On Monday, a Western official said: “Many European partners have deported Russian diplomats, mostly intelligence officers. Because of all the action we took after Salisbury, we do not really have many of this category of Russians at the embassy in London right now. So while we keep it under control, we have no plans at the moment. “
