Britain has blocked some $350 billion of assets from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war chest, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said on Tuesday.
“Until now, our sanctions have had a devastating impact on those who feed and finance Putin’s war machine. This week we will announce that we have frozen more than 350,000 million dollars of Putin’s war funds,” Truss said during a joint press conference with his Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau.
This amount corresponds to “more than 60% of the 604,000 million dollars of foreign currency of the regime,” he indicated.
“Unavailable reserves, our coordinated sanctions are making the Russian economy go back to the Soviet era. But we can, and must, do more,” Truss said.
The minister also indicated that she will ask her members of the OTAN and the G7 to impose new sanctions such as prohibiting, for example, ports to Russian ships.
He will also ask to “hit the industries that fill Putin’s war coffers, such as gold, and agree on a clear timetable for eliminating Russian imports of oil, coal and gas,” he added.
Truss said she was shocked by “the images of Bucha”, where dozens of bodies were found last weekend following the withdrawal of Russian troops from the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital.
“These are heinous acts that we thought we had left in the 20th century,” he said.
