The flagrant abuse of human rights and the deportations of children aboard trains heading east inflicted on Ukraine by its Russian invaders directly evoke the evils of the Holocaust, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has told the JC.

In an exclusive interview following his return from a ten-day visit to Kyiv and Poland, he said he had always believed that the international institutions established after the Nazis’ defeat meant such horrors would never again be repeated on European soil. But now they had been — while Russia’s crimes and their attempt to justify them also contained “a specific antisemitic element”.

He recalled that as a young Army officer at the end of the 1980s, he had been taken to the Nazi camp at Bergen-Belsen, and later visited Auschwitz: “These were things we believed belonged in the history books.

"But when I’m hearing similar language being used to dehumanise Ukrainians, and all those antisemitic tropes being directed at the Zelenskys and others in Ukraine, it is a reminder that the institutions that we set up to stop these things happening have not done so.”

Mr Cleverly said he had been struck by the “widespread evidence” of abuse throughout the territory recently recaptured from the Russians, but “one of the things that really hit me hard was the forced deportation of children in areas of Ukraine under Russian military control.

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Paying his respects: James Cleverly at the Radegast Holocaust Memorial in Poland

“There are people who have been taken away from families where perhaps the adults have gone off to fight and the children are being looked after by grandparents or by mothers.

"These children are being forcibly relocated and put on trains and sent east to be indoctrinated into hating Ukraine.”

First shown the evidence of Russian deportations in Ukraine, Mr Cleverly said that a few days later he visited the Radegast train station in Lodz, where an exhibition memorialises the children transported to the death camps from there: “And literally I’m seeing images and train carriages from that period. And those two things, the testimony from the Ukrainians and that memorial, were really striking.

“I know that comparisons with Nazism are deployed far too readily. The scale of what happened during the Shoah was at a level that was unprecedented and hasn’t been seen since.

"But when you see things that are so jarringly similar, it makes it hard not to make that comparison. It seared into my head and heart the importance of what we’re doing to help Ukraine defend itself.”

Mr Cleverly said he often walked past the Methodist Hall in Westminster where “the United Nations was created and first sat. I went from there in London to a NATO meeting and then to a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

"And all of these post-war institutions were designed to make sure that the kind of things we saw could never happen again.”

However, “what we’re now seeing is sadly a similar attitude to that era”, with the propaganda emanating from Russian TV “justifying completely unjustifiable behaviour: the attacks on civilians; the use of sexual violence in conflict; the forced relocations of children — and this with a directly antisemitic element as well.”

Asked about whether the incoming Israeli government with its far-right Religious Zionist ministers would affect relations with the UK, Mr Cleverly said Britain had “seen complicated coalitions” in Jerusalem before.

“We have a very longstanding relationship and we’ve been critical of Israel where it’s been warranted.”

He said that Britain’s policy goals remained the same, including support for a “two-state” solution.