UK hits Russia with largest wave of sanctions yet on fourth anniversary of Putin's war in Ukraine
The UK has hit Russia with its largest wave of sanctions since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine four years ago.
Listen to this article
The package, the largest imposed since the early months of the war in 2022, targets Russia’s oil and gas industry, including pipeline company PJSC Transneft, which the Foreign Office said was responsible for transporting more than 80% of Russian oil exports
A further 175 companies and 48 tankers involved in “shadow fleet” operations to move Russian oil have also been hit.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who is visiting Kyiv to mark the fourth anniversary of Putin’s war, said: “Russia is now four years into what Putin believed would be a three-day invasion.
“As the Kremlin continues its barbaric assault against innocent civilians that have suffered their most brutal winter in a decade, the courage and determination of the Ukrainian people endures.
“The UK has today taken decisive action to disrupt the critical financing, military equipment and revenue streams that sustain Russia’s aggression, in our largest raft of measures since the early months of the invasion.”
It comes as Sir Keir Starmer vowed the UK would stand by Ukraine until Russian aggression is defeated.
He paid tribute to “the incredible resilience of the Ukrainians” as he told his Cabinet that Kyiv’s allies “must defeat the falsehood that Russia is winning”.
Addressing his ministers in Downing Street, the Prime Minister said: “I wanted also to pay tribute to the incredible resilience of the Ukrainians, and it is incredible resilience.
“When this conflict broke out four years ago, it was assumed it would be a matter of weeks before Putin took the whole of Ukraine. That’s what everybody believed.
“Four years later, the Ukrainians are holding out against that aggression, holding out on the front line where the circumstances are extremely challenging, but also holding out in civilian life where every day Ukrainians get up and go to work as a sign of resilience and defiance.
“And we must defeat the falsehood that Russia is winning.
“Because if you look at the last year alone, Russia took 0.8% of land in Ukraine at a terrible cost to themselves, half a million losses.”
The PM spoke of three impressions of “four long years of suffering in Ukraine” as he marked four years of the war in an address to Cabinet.
The Prime Minister said: “You will have your own images and memories of that suffering. I’ve got three etched in my mind.”
He said he went to Bucha near Kyiv in the early days of the war, where he saw “the roads and the ditches in which Ukrainian civilians were handcuffed with their hands behind their back, blindfolded and shot in the head, the bodies left in the road”.
“The second etched in my memory was last year when I went to one of the busiest hospitals in Kyiv and saw for myself the incredibly awful burns on some of those who had returned from the front line. Burns the like of which I’d never seen in my life before.
“And at the same time, I went to a primary school and these children who were five, six, seven years old, had lost both their parents to the conflict.”