Writing for The Telegraph, the former veterans’ minister went to Lviv and Kyiv to witness the horror at first hand

ByJohnny Mercer18 March 2022 •

Johnny Mercer said that Britain ‘can be proud of our military role in this conflict’

“They didn’t even ask any questions. They just started shooting into my van. So I drove straight at them. Three of them went under the wheels. Definitely dead. I ran over three Russians in my Citroen Berlingo and made it back to our soldiers who got me here.”

This was just one of the mind-blowing testimonies I was privileged to hear over the past week in Kyiv. I had made a friend some years ago who at the time was an MP for Donetsk and who had invited me to see for myself thehorrors caused by Russia’s invasion. 

So a week ago, I boarded a plane to Krakow, Poland, then took the train across the border – against the tide of refugees heading west – to Lviv, Ukraine. “Good luck,” said the border guard as we crossed into the warzone.

Lviv was oddly normal despite the conflict. We didn’t stay long, spending a day touring the local aid depot that was the National Art Gallery before taking a 10-hour overnight train to Kyiv.

Once in Kyiv, we used local fixers to get around, meeting civic leaders and parliamentarians doing humanitarian work, and visiting wounded veterans in various hospitals. We travelled to the front lines too, where regular automatic fire and shelling rumbled on for most of the day.

The fighting and bombing are indiscriminate

People are, of course, interested in the fighting and the bombing. There is plenty. It is totally indiscriminate; the children’s injuries are horrific and the dead lie waiting for their family to collect them from the side of the road coming out of Irpin.

But what I was particularly interested in was the people. What do MPs do when their country is at war? How does a modern European state transform itself from peacetime to total warfare on its territory? 

War, if nothing else, is about people. And this generation of Ukrainians are extraordinary. Their thirst to be part of the European family for Western values and democracy, in the face of such carnage, took my breath away. Determined to treat their prisoners well; convinced in the utter rightness of their mission, they are young. 

Many of them are not soldiers. But they possess a spirit I have seldom seen in a fighting force, and reinforce my pre-held conceptions that if you have a strong moral component – that will to fight, garnered through good leadership and looking after your people – you can achieve the unexpected in battle.

The killing is indiscriminate. The checkpoints that open fire without question, irrespective of journalists or civilians, as was seen twice to devastating effect whilst I was there with the sad deaths of three brave journalists. 

I was once a “targeteer”; it was my trade. The cruise missiles coming into Kyiv are not clipping high-rise apartment blocks as they zero in on some Ukrainian secret military facility. They are landing right on target – often right through the front door – bottom centre of the block. 

These are no mistakes. It is deliberate targeting of civilians in their homes with the deliberate intent of breaking their will and accelerating the collapse of the Ukrainian state. We cannot let that happen. 

In Kyiv, I met Igor, a commander in the territorial defence force, who showed me a crate with dozens of brand new PKM machine guns. Asked who had supplied them, he replied: “Santa Claus.” 

We visited a children’s hospital where I met Vlodimyr, a 12-year-old boy shot in his parents’ car as they approached a Russian checkpoint near Irpin. His father died at the scene while a bullet remains in the little boy’s spine.

We drove north from Kyiv to the last Ukrainian checkpoint. Russians had fired in mortars only half an hour earlier.

On Wednesday, we made the trip back to the West, a 30-hour journey back to safety.

Britain, I thought, can be proud of our military role in this conflict. Everyone I met mentioned Boris Johnson. They knew who Ben Wallace was. They knew we were first to provide lethal aid, and said how tough it must have been to be first. I have had spectacular run-ins with both these individuals on military matters. Be under no illusions: they were brave, got this right, and we should be proud of them. For this is our generation’s righteous war. 

It was extraordinary to see a modern nation such as Ukraine turn itself into a warfighting machine. MPs running humanitarian centres, IT managers becoming adept at information operations, and shopkeepers manning 12.7mm DShK machine guns. But this war involves all of us – it just happens to be the Ukrainians on the front at the moment.

Make no mistake – we must win this war

Vladimir Putin has lost his mind. The only de-Nazificationhe keeps referring to needs to take place in the Kremlin. The nature of modern war – for this is truly modern – means this outcome will be anything other than the predicted rollover. Information operations are in a different league; weapons technology in the hands of determined defenders means this is definitely not the Cold War reheated as some of our more seasoned commentators would insist.

The Russian army might just collapse – I think they will. An army that doesn’t bother to collect her dead rarely wins. And that could just herald the end of Putin and a new era of peace and prosperity for a Russian people that we must be prepared to embrace should they turn on him. So we must strain every sinew to achieve that outcome. 

Aid – lethal aid – must be redoubled. They do not need legions of young men to go and fight, and I would urge veterans and others to think hard before they do. It was one of the most dangerous places I’ve been. 

If we can “close the sky” as the Ukrainians so wish – not through jets like days gone by, but through technology and air defence systems to achieve the same outcome – the Ukrainians will beat Russia on the ground. And then we are looking at a completely different global scene where Russia is forced to change.

I plead guilty to the charge of overplaced optimism, perhaps. But we must win this war. And the UK must do everything in its power to ensure that outcome.