LONDON, March 24. /TASS/: The UK authorities have added a number of Russian banks, companies and defense sector enterprises to the black list. According to the list updated on Thursday, 59 individuals and legal entities from Russia come under restrictive measures.
In particular, the list includes Sberbank CEO Herman Gref, the first deputy of the board of the bank Alexander Vedyakhin and the ex-deputy Chairman Lev Khasis, businessmen Oleg Tinkov and Evgeny Shvidler.
Sanctions have been imposed on Oleg Aksyutin, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Gazprom, Belgian Didier Casimiro, First Vice President of Rosneft, Croat Zeljko Runje, Vice President of Rosneft for Offshore Projects, and Ivan Sechin, son of Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin.
Restrictions apply to Deputy Prime Minister - Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Federation in the Far Eastern Federal District Yury Trutnev, Plenipotentiary Representatives in the Northwestern, Urals, Volga and Siberian Federal Districts Alexander Gutsan, Vladimir Yakushev, Igor Komarov and Anatoly Seryshev, as well as Deputy Minister of Defense Dmitry Bulgakov.
Polina Kovaleva, whom the British Foreign Office calls the stepdaughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and the acting mayor of Ukrainian Melitopol, Galina Danilchenko also came under the sanctions. These individuals are banned from entering the UK and their assets there, if found, will be frozen.
Blacklisted banks and companies
The sanctioned legal entities include Gazprombank, Russian agricultural bank, Alfa-Bank, SMP Bank, and the Ural Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Sanctions were also imposed against Russian Railways, Sovcomflot, RusHydro, Alrosa and the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex and electronics manufacturers, in particular the JSC Makeyev Design Bureau, the Defense Initiatives company and the Kronstadt Group drone developer.
Commenting on the new sanctions, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said that London "will continue to tighten the screw and use sanctions to degrade the Russian economy on a scale that the Kremlin, or any major economy, has never seen before."
On British sanctions
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on February 24 that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation in Ukraine, stressing that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories. Western countries responded to the actions of the Russian authorities by slapping sanctions against physical and legal entities.
Since February 24, taking into account the decisions announced on Thursday, the UK has imposed sanctions against more than a thousand Russian politicians, businessmen, officials, journalists and businesses. In addition, sanctions targeted the Bank of Russia and a number of Russian banks, the export of goods was prohibited in a number of industries, the British skies were closed to Russian aircraft, Russian ships were banned from entering British ports, and many private companies decided to suspend operations in Russia or completely withdraw from Russian projects and refuse to invest in them.
