London, Feb 22: The UK government on Tuesday imposed tough sanctions against five Russian banks and three super-rich oligarchs from the country over President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive action on the Ukraine border.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that this is the “first tranche” of measures in response to Russian troops moving into two separatist regions of Ukraine.
The sanctions target Rossiya, IS Bank, General Bank, Promsvyazbank and the Black Sea Bank, as well as billionaires Gennady Timchenko, Boris Rotenberg and Igor Rotenberg as three “very high net worth individuals”.
All three have been on the US sanctions list for a number of years as associates of Putin. “Any assets they hold in the UK will be frozen, the individuals concerned will be banned from travelling here, and we will prohibit all UK individuals and entities from having any dealings with them,” Johnson told Parliament.
“This is the first tranche, the first barrage, of what we are prepared to do: we will hold further sanctions at readiness, to be deployed alongside the United States and the European Union if the situation escalates still further…we should steel ourselves for a protracted crisis. “The United Kingdom will meet this challenge side-by-side with our allies, determined that we will not allow Putin to drag our continent back into a Hobbesian state of nature, where aggression pays and might is right,” he said.
“And it is precisely because the stakes are so high that Putin’s venture in Ukraine must fail, must ultimately fail and be seen to fail. That will require the perseverance, the unity and the resolve of the entire Western alliance, and Britain will do everything possible to ensure that that unity is maintained,” Johnson added.
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