Sanctions...stepdaughter of Lavrov living in UK
BRITAIN has sanctioned 65 more people and organisations connected to the Kremlin, including the UK-based stepdaughter of Russian foreign secretary Sergey Lavrov.
Ministers announced the raft of new restrictions against entities and individuals deemed to be fuelling Moscow’s war machine yesterday.
Those cited included the Wagner Group, a paramilitary organisation seen as Vladimir Putin’s private army.
Thugs
A notice from the Foreign Office said 59 entries had been added to the list, while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said there were 65 new sanctions.
She said: “These oligarchs, businesses and hired thugs are complicit in the murder of innocent civilians and it is right that they pay the price. There will be no let-up.
“The Government 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.” Those hit included the glamorous stepdaughter of Putin’s loyal foreign secretary Lavrov.
Polina Kovaleva, 26 – who lives in London in a £4.4million Kensington home she bought with no mortgage aged 21 – has had all her UK assets frozen.
She went to a private boarding school in Bristol before gaining a first-class degree in economics with politics at Loughborough University and completed a masters at Imperial College London.
Kovaleva went on to work for Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, where she helped with mergers and acquisitions and later was employed by Glencore, the mining company. Also sanctioned yesterday was the Wagner Group which employs mercenaries. It has been accused of trying to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior Ukrainian politicians. Russian Railways and the defence company Kronshtadt, the main producer of Russian drones, were also added to the sanctions list.