Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the western response to Vladimir Putin’s growing list of crimes has been to impose sanctions on his “cronies”. In recent years there have been particularly insistent demands for sanctions on rich Russian oligarchs resident in London.
So the UK government’s response this week to Putin’s recognition of the separatist republics in Ukraine’s Donbas region took the usual form: sanctions against five Russian banks and three oligarchs.
