Healey: I would kidnap Putin

 The Defence Secretary has said he would kidnap Vladimir Putin to hold him accountable for his war crimes.

John Healey made the remark on a one-day visit to Kyiv on Friday just hours after Russia launched a barrage of missile attacks against Ukraine. 

He met with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, at the presidential palace and announced that Britain will spend £200 million to prepare its troops for a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine.

On a visit to the site of a drone strike on a high-rise residential building, he told the Kyiv Independent that, given the option of being able to kidnap any world leader, he would “take Putin into custody and hold him [to] account for war crimes.”

His comments followed the United States’s extraordinary capture of Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan president, on Jan 3.

Mr Healey said the Russian president’s war crimes included “what I saw in Bucha on one of my first visits to Ukraine,” and the abduction of “some of the Ukrainian kids that I met in [the city of] Irpin.”

Mass graves were uncovered in Bucha, a town outside Kyiv, after it was liberated by Ukrainian troops in April 2022. Mr Healey visited a memorial for the victims on one of his first visits to Ukraine in May 2024.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president over the abduction of Ukrainian children. Putin has been accused of forcibly deporting “hundreds” of Ukrainian children, among them orphans, to Russia.

During his visit to the destroyed building in Kyiv on Friday, Mr Healey said it “tells you all you need to know about president Putin and his determination not just to wage a war on Ukraine, but to target civilians, cities, the infrastructure that people absolutely critically depend on in the middle of winter.”

“This is a man who must be stopped. This is a war that must be stopped. And our mission is to support Ukraine in its fight today and to help work to secure the peace for the moment,” he added.

On Thursday night, Ukraine’s air force said Russia attacked the country with a combination of 242 drones and 36 missiles.

Ukraine’s capital was heavily targeted, with apartment blocks set alight and at least four people killed and 24 wounded.

Some neighbourhoods were plunged into darkness during what Vitali Klitschko, the city mayor, described as a “massive enemy missile attack”. He said running water and electricity were also disrupted as a result of strikes on critical infrastructure.

Putin’s troops also fired the Oreshnik missile – a hypersonic ballistic missile that has only been used once before in combat and is capable of carrying nuclear warheads – at the western city of Lviv overnight on Friday. Russia claims the missile is impossible to shoot down

Moscow’s defence ministry said the ‍strikes were in retaliation to a widely debunked claim that Ukraine targeted one of Putin’s residences with drones at the end of December.

Kyiv, backed by US intelligence, has dismissed that accusation as a “lie”. Russia failed to produce any credible evidence for its claim.

The attack came after Moscow rejected the latest post-war peacekeeping plan put forward by Kyiv’s allies, calling it “dangerous and destructive.”

Ukraine and its western allies, in an effort to bring an end to the war as it approaches the four-year mark, agreed this week that Europe would deploy troops after any ceasefire as part of post-war guarantees for the country.

Across the border in Russia’s Belgorod, the governor said more than half a million people were without power or heating after a Ukrainian attack targeted the region’s utilities.

Nearly 200,000 people were also cut off from water supplies, according to local authorities.