Well, blow me down with a feather duster. That’s basically what the government has announced today: we are going to blow Vladimir Putin down with a feather duster.
These aren’t meaningful sanctions. They are the bare minimum of what we should have done weeks ago, when Putin first announced that he did not respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. They are not a proper response to Putin’s declaration of independence for Donetsk and Luhansk and his sending in of troops. I don’t doubt that Putin is laughing his way to his dacha. His mocking sidekick Dmitry Medvedev said as much yesterday.
The Russian banks that Boris Johnson put on the sanctions list today aren’t the major players: they’re the spare change in the Russian economy. The three individuals he named have already been sanctioned in the US since 2018. So, we’re picking off the minnows but allowing the basking sharks to swim freely. Johnson didn’t even know whom we had already sanctioned, claiming that Roman Abramovich was on the list and refusing to correct the record when I asked him about it. Later in the day, his office had to own up that he was wrong. Is it too much to expect that a prime minister at a moment of international crisis would actually know some of the details?
Johnson keeps on saying that we are going to have a public register of beneficial ownership of UK property, so that shell companies owning swaths of UK property can’t hide their oligarch owners. Yet the government has been promising this for years – and Companies House still doesn’t have the power or the resources to verify information registered with it, so it’s easy to lie with impunity.
Johnson says they are closing the gold-plated tier 1 visa scheme for wealthy “investors”, but he still won’t tell us how many oligarchs were granted rights here without a proper examination of where their wealth came from. It’s difficult not to worry that the Russians who have given money to the Tories can have done so only because they were given UK nationality by the Tories. In any other country we would call that corruption.
What angers me is that this is exactly what we did when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Some useful idiots then repeated the claims that Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia. Others said it was as much part of Russia as the Isle of Wight is British. Yes, the west huffed and puffed. We introduced a few minor sanctions. But soon we lost interest.
Putin is a liar and a ruthless dictator. Human rights groups have long documented his regime’s record of repression and terror. He is a kleptocrat; consider the plunder by him and his allies of Russia’s wealth. Some estimates say he has become the richest man on the planet. He has ruthless imperial ambitions, with his hankering to construct a “greater Russia”, with echoes of the old Soviet Union. He regularly resorts to excessive use of force. Witness the 334 hostages killed at Beslan school in 2004, including 176 children, or the 130 killed in the Moscow theatre siege. He understands only force, and a feather duster isn’t going to stop him.
When he resigned as foreign secretary, Johnson said that his biggest mistake was how he dealt with Russia. Today was another lost opportunity. We appear weak, spineless and vacillating. We still don’t seem able to wean ourselves off Russian money, and government communications are so chaotic that it’s unclear whether we think Russia has invaded Ukraine yet or not.
We need much tougher, wider sanctions. We need reform of Companies House so we know the truth behind shell companies. We need a new Foreign Lobbying Act, reform to the Official Secrets Act and the immediate publication of the review into tier 1 visas.
In my book, Putin has crossed the line. MPs of all hues agree. We are keen for the UK and her allies to put on a united front – and show some real mettle.
Chris Bryant is the Labour MP for Rhondda and a member of the Commons foreign affairs select committee
