BREAKING: EU and Britain add new sanctions targeting Putin, Russian foreign minister
On top of personally targeting Putin with sanctions, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for 'immediate action' to punish Russia through the SWIFT financial transaction service.
The European Union and the United Kingdom have added a new round of sanctions against Russia, targeting both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The sanctions, which are set to take place “imminently,” are on top of previous sanctions targeting Russian businessmen and banks.
“This is the final outcome of the discussion that was not finished yesterday at the European Council and has been decided today by the ambassadors and the Ministers,” said EU’s High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Joseph Borrell in a press conference Friday.
“So President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov are in the list of sanctioned people together with the remaining members the Duma who are supporting this aggression,” he added.
Borrell noted that at the present, the only world leaders sanctioned by the European Union are Syrian President Assad and Belarusian President Lukashenko, “and now Putin,” he said.
In a readout during his call to NATO, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged the union to “take immediate action against SWIFT to inflict maximum pain on President Putin and his regime.”
SWIFT is the banking network that connects thousands of financial institutions around the world, allowing the high-speed transaction of currency to facilitate trade and commerce.
Speaking to his counterparts, Johnson said that “a catastrophe was engulfing Ukraine,” and described Putin’s actions as a “revanchist mission to over-turn post-Cold War order.”
He warned that Putin’s “ambitions might not stop there” and called the ongoing war in Ukraine as a “Euro-Atlantic crisis with global consequences.”
“The Prime Minister added that the world must make certain President Putin would fail in this act of aggression. Ukraine was showing strong resistance. He added that there could no normalization of relations with Russia after this act,” a statement from the British government read.
“The UK stood ready for any further request from NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe to go further with military support to NATO from UK Armed Forces,” said Johnson in his meeting with NATO.
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