The Liberal Democrats are urging the government to provide replacement funding to an American project that locates Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, as the party gathers for a spring conference heavily focused on the response to Donald Trump.
British support for the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University could be part of a more robust approach towards the US president, particularly over Ukraine, according to Calum Miller, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson.
Earlier this month, Yale said US government funding for the lab, which has attempted to track the fate of the estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children taken to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, had been ended as part of cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency.
Miller will present a motion to the party’s gathering in Harrogate expressing “profound alarm” at Trump’s presidency and calling for closer European collaboration in response. He is calling for the government to immediately use the £2bn-plus proceeds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC to help such efforts.
“We’d like to think that some of this Abramovich money could be put to exactly those purposes, so this terrible chapter of children being forcibly removed and almost indoctrinated in Russia, can be brought to an end, but also hopefully when those children return to Ukraine they can be given all the support they need as part of a humanitarian package,” Miller told the Guardian.
His party is also demanding more urgent efforts are made to find a way to use other frozen Russian capital assets to help support Ukraine, which Miller said could be justified on the basis of “Russia’s singular responsibility for this war”.
He said: “This is the aggressor. And what we’re talking about here are assets that either belong to the Russian state or to individuals who have been sanctioned because of their culpability in that conflict.
“And therefore these are essentially assets of war, and ones that I think it should be possible for European partners to come together and agree could be redeployed to support Ukraine, especially in the face of a threat of removal of American support.”
More widely, Miller said, while he understood the compromises Keir Starmer and colleagues had to make in not antagonising the US administration, there was a need for a more robust approach towards Trump.
“When you face the unpredictability that the current White House presents, it’s almost more important to set out some of your own red lines and some of your anchors, so that the White House itself understands that there are limits to what you’re prepared to do,” he said. “And I think in a few areas, we’ve failed to see the clarity around those red lines.”
Miller entered frontline politics just four years ago when he became an Oxfordshire county councillor, but with his background as a senior civil servant and then heading Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, he was given the foreign affairs brief immediately after becoming an MP in July.
His parliamentary seat, Bicester and Woodstock, was one of about 60 constituencies in traditionally Conservative-dominated areas which the Lib Dems took in last year’s election.
Miller said that the Tories’ approach to Trump seemed unlikely to persuade back former voters in areas like his.
“I’m genuinely baffled by the approach taken by the Conservatives in this regard, fawning over Donald Trump at his inauguration and declaring a new era in UK-US relations. It looked unwise at the time and events since have proven how ill-advised it was,” he said.
“So many people in my area opened their doors to Ukrainian families, like they did across the whole country. Voters can see that the Russians have been emboldened and empowered by the US administration, and they think that’s just the wrong thing.”
