UK sanctions five banks in response to Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine
The UK has sanctioned five Russian banks and three oligarchs close to the Kremlin in response to Vladimir Putin’s move last night to invade parts of Eastern Ukraine.
Boris Johnson told MPs this afternoon that Rossiya Bank, IS bank, Genbank, Promsvyazbank and the Black Sea Bank have all been barred from trading in the UK and their assets have been frozen.
Russian billionaires and Putin associates Gennady Timchenko, Boris Rotenberg and Igor Rotenberg have had their UK assets frozen and are now banned from entering the country.
The UK will also sanction members of the Russian Duma who voted to recognise the independence of Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, and extend its sanctions of Crimea in the wake of its 2014 annexation by Russia to these areas as well.
It comes after German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced today that the £10bn Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany would be cancelled in retaliation for Russia’s actions.
Russia’s two largest banks, Sberbank and VTB Bank, both still made gains today on the Moscow Exchange after the British sanctions were not as tough as expected.
Johnson said Putin’s incursion into Ukraine was an “invasion” of the country and warned that Russia was still planning on marching on Kyiv.
“This is the first tranche, the first barrage of what we are prepared to do and we hold further sanctions at readiness to be deployed together with the US and EU if the situation escalates still further,” Johnson said.
The five sanctioned banks are all relatively small, however Rossiya is known to have very close links to the Kremlin and Promsvyazbank was described by western officials as a “key actor in propping up Russia’s defence sector”.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer welcomed Johnson’s sanctions, but said they did not go far enough.
“I understand the tactic of holding back further sanctions on Putin and his cronies to try and deter an invasion of the rest of Ukraine,” he said.
“But a threshold has already been breached. Russia should be excluded from financial mechanisms like Swift and we should ban trading in Russian sovereign debt.
“Putin’s campaign of misinformation should be tackled, Russia Today should be prevented from broadcasting its propaganda around the world.”
Foreign Affairs Committee chair and Tory MP Tom Tugendhat said: “Sanctions matter only if they make the Kremlin think again.
“These are a repetition of US sanctions. We need to do more if they’re to count.”
The Russian president last night recognised the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, two cities in the Donbass region of Ukraine, after eight years of fighting between Ukrainian forces and Kremlin-backed separatists.
Russian tanks rolled into these areas soon after.
“The House should be in no doubt that the deployment of these forces in sovereign Ukrainian territory amounts to a renewed invasion of that country. And by denying Ukraine’s legitimacy as a state – and presenting its very existence as a mortal threat to Russia – Putin is establishing the pretext for a full-scale offensive,” Johnson said.
“I think Honourable Members will struggle to understand how or to contemplate, how in the year 2022, a national leader might calmly and deliberately plot the destruction of a peaceful neighbour, yet the evidence of his own words suggests that is exactly what President Putin is doing. When I said on Saturday that his scheme to subvert and invade Ukraine was already in motion before our eyes, the events of the last 24 hours have, sadly, shown this to be true.
“We must now brace ourselves for the next possible stages of Putin’s plan: the violent subversion of areas of eastern Ukraine by Russian operatives and their hirelings, followed by a general offensive by the nearly 200,000 Russian troops gathered on the frontiers, at peak readiness to attack.”
Liz Truss today summoned Russia’s ambassador to the UK Andrei Kelin today, however the foreign secretary is not expected to expel the diplomat.