Defence chief pays tribute to city’s people for Ukraine support.
The Secretary of State for Defence John Healey has paid tribute to the people of Milton Keynes after Emily Darlington MP shared a statement from the city’s Ukrainian community with him.
Following a Russian attack on Kyiv last week that hit a British Government building, the Milton Keynes Central MP read a statement from Viktoriya Shtanko, Chief Executive Officer of the Ukraine Appeal & Sunflower Ukrainian Supplementary School, to the Defence Secretary.
It described the British Council as ‘a symbol of education, culture, and international partnership’ and the attack as representing ‘not only damage to a building but an assault on the very principles of openness and cultural exchange that define the United Kingdom’s global leadership’.
“I pay tribute to the people of Milton Keynes who have opened their homes to house the families of those Ukrainian children,” said Mr Healey.
“It is often the children and the families who will feel the threat and the grief most fiercely, and the fact that they have expressed such strong solidarity with those British Council workers in the face of that attack is something that we all appreciate, and I would be grateful on behalf of the House if she (Emily Darlington) passed that on.”
Emily Darlington also spoke about the Ukraine Appeal’s exhibition ‘Faces of Ukrainian Dream’ which opened in Bletchley Park in August. Created by Ukrainian children displaced by war, the exhibition ‘embodies resilience, hope and the vision of a peaceful future’.
