The “first barrage of UK economic sanctions against Russia” will be announced on Tuesday, Boris Johnson has said, as one of his senior cabinet ministers said the Russian “invasion of Ukraine has begun”.
Speaking after a 6.30am Cobra meeting, Johnson said the Kremlin was bent on a “full-scale invasion of Ukraine” and said the UK’s sanctions would hit the “economic interests that have been supporting Russia’s war machine”, a suggestion the UK was prepared to continue ratcheting up measures.
“They will hit Russia very hard and there is a lot more that we are going to do in the event of an invasion. Be in no doubt that if Russian companies are prevented from raising capital on the UK financial markets, if we unpeel the facade of Russian ownership of companies, of property, it will start to hurt.”
Johnson said his package would go further than those announced so far by the US, which are currently limited to the Ukrainian territories Russia has recognised as breakaway states.
He said it was now clear that sanctions implemented after the 2014 invasion of Crimea were “not tough enough” and issued a veiled warning to European states that more had to be done.
“We didn’t do enough as Europeans to wean ourselves off Russian hydrocarbons, off Russian oil and gas and to a certain extent now the vagaries of the price in gas, the spikes in gas prices to which European economies are so vulnerable is a consequence of that failure to move away from that dependency,” he said. “That’s what we’ve got to do now, we’ve got to make sure that we cut the umbilicus, we snip the drip feed into our bloodstream from Nord Stream.”
Sajid Javid, the health secretary, said he would agree that the threat posed by Russia’s action was on a par with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. “It’s a violation of international law, and we and Nato will not accept it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Johnson convened the 6.30am meeting as Vladimir Putin ordered troops over the Ukrainian border into territories in the east of the country, where Russian troops already have significant presence. A statement to MPs is expected later on Tuesday.
Earlier, Putin had recognised what he termed the independence of the Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, in defiance of international agreements and ordered in forces under the guise of “peacekeeping”.
The US and UK believe that the Russian entry into eastern Ukraine is a precursor for a more sweeping invasion, though the US has not yet used the term to describe the latest troop movements. The EU’s foreign affairs representative said the bloc did not consider a “fully fledged invasion” had occurred.
But Javid took a stronger line on Tuesday morning, telling Sky News: “We have seen that he has recognised these breakaway eastern regions in Ukraine and from the reports we can already tell that he has sent in tanks and troops. From that you can conclude that the invasion of Ukraine has begun.”
Overnight, Johnson spoke to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, telling him he would explore sending further defensive support to Ukraine, at the request of the Ukrainian government.
Asked on Tuesday how much further that could go, Johnson said: “I think that they have a right to defend their country and the UK will help them do that. We’re looking at what we can do, what more we can do to help.
“As you know, we’ve trained about 22,000 members of the Ukrainian armed forces, and also given them some anti-tank weaponry and some other kit, but we’ll look at what more we can do.”
The Cobra meeting follows an emergency session of the UN security council where the UK’s ambassador, Dame Barbara Woodward, said Russia had “brought us to the brink”, warning that its actions “will have severe and far-reaching consequences”.
She said an invasion would unleash “the forces of war, death and destruction” on the people of Ukraine. “The humanitarian impact will be terrible on civilians fleeing the fighting. We know that women and children will suffer most.”
She said the security council must be united in calling on Russia to “de-escalate immediately”, as well as “condemning aggression against a sovereign nation and defending the territorial integrity of Ukraine”.
The EU’s foreign affairs high representative, Josep Borrell, will also convene an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday, in which EU foreign ministers will adopt sanctions against Russia over its recognition of Ukrainian separatist regions. “I’m sure there will be a unanimous decision,” he said.
However, there are differences in opinion within the EU as to the strength of the package that will be imposed on Russia at this stage, with Borrell suggesting that Russia had not, as yet, launched a “fully fledged” invasion although its troops were on Ukrainian soil.
.jpg?w=600)
