Boris Johnson is being urged to “go further and faster” with sanctions against the Kremlin for the invasion of Ukraine, including a ban on luxury exports to Russia.
In a letter to senior cabinet ministers, members of the Labour frontbench insisted Vladimir Putin and his Russian associates should “not be able to live a Mayfair lifestyle in Moscow”.
No 10 recently announced the Russian president and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, would be directly targeted by sanctions and earlier this week, the prime minister imposed asset freezes on Russian banks, airlines, and oligarchs close to Putin.
But in a letter to foreign secretary Liz Truss and chancellor Rishi Sunak, three of Labour’s senior frontbenchers urge the government to “go further and faster”. Rachel Reeves, David Lammy and Nick Thomas-Symonds said “the hardest possible sanctions” must be levelled against the Kremlin, “so the regime faces the severest possible consequences for its actions”.
Measures the Labour figures call for include increasing the number of Russian banks prevented from accessing Sterling and clearing payments through the UK, including one of the country’s biggest banks, Sberbank.
After three more Kremlin-linked oligarchs were added to the sanction list earlier this week, the frontbenchers called on the government to expand the list, “as well as targeting Russian parliamentarians and officials and Belarusian officials”.
On export controls, they said: “We would widen export control measures to cover a wide range of goods and technology in sectors of strategic importance to the Russian economy. We should also close down the export of luxury goods from the UK to Russia, replicating measures already taken in the Syria sanctions regime.”
And in a bid to target illicit finance in the UK, the senior Labour MPs reiterated their demand for ministers to bring forward a Register of Overseas Entities Bill. “There is no need to wait for the next session of parliament. We have waited long enough – the government says that the legislation is ready to go, and Labour stands ready to support the necessary legislation to toughen sanctions and crack down on economic crime and illicit finance,” they said.
The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey also called on the government to introduce an “oligarch tax” in an attempt to offset any spike in energy prices following the Ukraine invasion. He said: “The government must immediately sanction Putin’s cronies who have money in our country and begin the process of seizing their assets, so we can recover the cost of this crisis from those who have links to Putin.
“Meanwhile, Russian-owned energy companies who are profiteering from this crisis must be subject to a windfall tax. An ‘oligarch tax’ will send a clear signal to Putin that we will take tough measures to combat his aggression – and insulate the British public from any side effects.”
