The UK has imposed its most significant wave of sanctions since Vladimir Putin launched his illegal war on Ukraine, highlighting the seriousness of its response.
The package, the largest since the early months of 2022, specifically targets Russia’s oil and gas sector, including pipeline company PJSC Transneft, which the Foreign Office said transports over 80% of Russian oil exports.
A further 175 companies and 48 tankers involved in shadow-fleet operations to move Russian oil have also been targeted, demonstrating the comprehensive nature of these sanctions.
Marking the fourth anniversary of the war, the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is visiting Kyiv.
Cooper 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.”
Sir Keir Starmer has said that the UK will continue to stand with Ukraine until Putin is defeated in Ukraine.
Starmer from Downing Street, “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.”
He continued, 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.”
