The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-24)

The Sunday Times April 24, 2022 19

million-pound property portfolio in the

UK whose aluminium company had sup-

plied the Russian military, according to

evidence given to parliament. It would be

another four years before Britain would

sanction Deripaska — and only then after

the second invasion of Ukraine.

The US had been consistently more

proactive in sanctioning alleged Putin

allies. After the 2014 invasion, it had

imposed sanctions on oligarchs such as

Vladimir Yakunin, a former business

partner and ex-KGB colleague of Putin.

Yakunin has family ties in the UK and is

said to have amassed a fortune from run-

ning the state-owned Russian Railways.

He has written a book, published in Lon-

don in 2018, which is supportive of Putin.

But he was sanctioned by Britain only this

month.

At the time Britain complied with the

EU sanction regime which had intro-

duced a series of economic and individ-

ual sanctions after the 2014 invasion.

However the sanctions on named people

were chiefly targeted at soldiers, officials

and politicians linked to the Crimea

incursion. Very few of Putin’s oligarchs

were targeted.

In the months after the Salisbury

attack, Johnson said the lack of action

compared with the US was because Brit-

ain had its “own approach” but did not

say what that was. This caused exaspera-

tion in America, where an official ques-

tioned whether there was any point

imposing sanctions when the Kremlin’s

allies could just circumvent them in

Britain.

The US was also pressing ahead with

arming Ukraine. In 2018, the American

government began selling hundreds of

Javelin anti-tank missiles to the country

to deter further aggression by Russia.

Since the first invasion, Fallon had

been persistently lobbied for more arms

by Petro Poroshenko, then president of

Ukraine, during annual visits to Kyiv. But

Johnson was firmly behind his govern-

ment’s policy of withholding weapons.

“The UK is contributing to the efforts to

stave off Russian military meddling with

the non-lethal equipment that we have

agreed to send to Ukraine,” he said in a

July 2017 parliamentary debate. “With

British help, I believe that it is prevailing

and will prevail.”

This optimistic view was a direct con-

trast to the position taken by the Ameri-

cans, according to a source who was a

minister at the time. The US had decided

to supply anti-tank missiles “because the

Ukrainians were getting bogged down in

Donbas” and “weren’t getting rid of the

Russians”, the source said.

Another senior Conservative source

said his government had been “tiptoeing

around the Kremlin”. He believed that

Russia might have been dissuaded from

invading Ukraine a second time if Britain

had acceded to its request for weapons.

“It made Ukraine a much more attractive

target in their eyes because we weren’t

“eye-watering quantity of capability”. He

added: “Rather like a chronic contagious

disease, it will creep up on us, and our

ability to act will be markedly con-

strained — and we’ll be the losers of this

competition,” he said.

ASSASSINS IN SALISBURY

By March 2018 Russia was continuing to

foment conflict among nationalists in

Donbas. In the same four-year period,

the Conservative Party had received

£1.5 million from donors linked to Russia.

May was reported to have wanted to

weaken this financial connection but, if

anything, her government was taking

even more cash from Russians who were

moving to Britain via the “golden visa”

scheme that allowed rich foreigners the

chance to buy the right to live in the UK.

The moment that might have changed

everything came on March 4 2018. It was

a cold but sunny afternoon when a man

and a younger woman were found foam-

ing at the mouth and falling in and out of

consciousness on a park bench in the

centre of Salisbury. They were identified

as Colonel Sergei Skripal, 66, a former

Russian military intelligence officer, and

his daughter Yulia, 33. Colonel Skripal

had been released in a spy swap with

Moscow eight years earlier.

The Skripals had both been poisoned

with the Russian nerve agent novichok

but doctors at Salisbury district hospital

managed to save their lives. Nick Bailey, a

detective sergeant with Wiltshire police,

was also poisoned and survived.

The two Russian assassins — Anatoly

Chepiga, a highly decorated military col-

onel, and Alexander Mishkin, a doctor in

the Russian intelligence service — dis-

carded a perfume bottle containing the

novichok, which killed Dawn Sturgess,

four months later. The police revealed

that there was enough nerve agent inside

the bottle to kill thousands of people.

Britain had little doubt that the Krem-

lin was behind the attacks and May

expelled 23 Russian diplomats. The

Kremlin responded in kind. It threw out

more than 100 British and international

officials, and labelled May “insane” for

blaming Russia. Little other punishment

was imposed on the Kremlin by Britain,

apart from token gestures such as John-

son withdrawing his invitation to Lavrov

for a return meeting in London and the

royal family boycotting the World Cup

finals in Russia.

After the Salisbury attack the govern-

ment took no action to crack down on

Putin’s oligarchs in London, but on the

other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump

imposed sanctions on seven oligarchs

close to Putin. “Russian oligarchs and

elites who profit from this corrupt system

will no longer be insulated from the con-

sequences of their government’s desta-

bilising activities,” Steven Mnuchin, the

US Treasury secretary, warned.

Among them was the Putin associate

Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire with a multi-

beware, we also want to engage, which is
why in the coming months the foreign
secretary will be visiting Moscow.”
Two days before the long-awaited first
meeting in Moscow, on December 20,
2017, the former Conservative minister
John Whittingdale secured a debate in
parliament to raise his concerns about
what he had witnessed during a trip to
Donbas as chairman of the all-party par-
liamentary group for Ukraine.
He had visited a coke-producing plant
in the city of Avdiivka that had been dam-
aged by Russian shelling and a military
hospital in Dnipro treating wounded sol-
diers. At the time, Putin-backed forces
held control of about a fifth of Ukraine’s
sovereign territory yet Britain was still
seeking a diplomatic solution after three
years of unproductive talks.
On a separate visit to the city of Mariu-
pol,Whittingdale was told that arms were
needed because there was “a very strong
chance” of a further Russian military
advance. The commander of Ukrainian
forces presciently predicted the port city
would be “first in line” in the attack.
In the debate, which was attended by
two dozen MPs, Whittingdale suggested
that failing to adequately support
Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian
incursion would prove reminiscent of
the ill-fated deal in which Neville Cham-
berlain allowed Nazi Germany to annex
large parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
“Some might draw a comparison to
what Chamberlain said about Czechoslo-
vakia, that it is a ‘far away country’ about
which we know little. If they do, they
make the same mistake Chamberlain
made,” he said. “Ukraine matters to us. It
is a country in mainland Europe whose
territory has been violated by an aggres-
sive neighbour, and is on the front line of
what is becoming a new Cold War.”

BENTLEYS AND CRISPS
Three days before Christmas 2017, John-
son became the first minister to visit Mos-
cow for five years. In the press confer-
ence afterwards, he sat uncomfortably
with Lavrov and dutifully cited a list of
“difficulties” over Ukraine and cyber-
attacks that Britain could not ignore.
However, he was still optimistic that
Britain could do business with Russia.
The country presented a large and
untapped export market for British
goods now that the UK was to depart the
EU. “I am delighted to say that there are
increasing exports of British Kettle crisps
to Russia and in spite of all the difficulties
I believe 300 Bentleys were sold this year
in Russia,” Johnson enthused.
The failure to take Russia seriously
was beginning to frustrate the army’s top
brass. Four weeks after the Moscow
meeting, General Sir Nick Carter, chief of
the general staff, described Russia as the
biggest threat to the UK which “could ini-
tiate hostilities sooner than we expect”.
Carter warned that Russia was building
an increasingly aggressive army with an

I MADE

THE MISTAKE

OF THINKING

IT WAS

POSSIBLE

TO HAVE A

RESET WITH

RUSSIA. THAT

WAS A FOOL’S

ERRAND

Boris Johnson

home. This increases the chance of a real

catastrophe because eventually he will

push too far.” The committee’s findings

were published in a report entitled “Mos-

cow’s Gold: Russian Corruption in the

UK” in May 2018. The MPs said the failure

by the government to crack down on the

oligarchs’ corrupt money was endanger-

ing national security and undermining

efforts to build a global response to the

Salisbury attack.

The report called upon the govern-

ment to identify and sanction individuals

in the UK connected with the Kremlin.

The aim was to treat people who facili-

tated Putin’s work as if they were part of

the regime, according to Bob Seely, a

Conservative MP on the committee. “We

believed action should have been taken

against them,” he said.

‘IT’S NOT GOOD FOR THE CITY’

The responsibility for implementing and

monitoring the progress of this new

approach to sanctions would have fallen

to Johnson’s Foreign Office. But the

department was reluctant to accept the

MPs’ recommendations. It said the Sanc-

tions and Anti-Money Laundering Act —

which was introduced that summer in

preparation for Britain’s exit from the EU

— would give it powers to sanction indi-

viduals if necessary. A register of owner-

ship for overseas companies that had

acquired property in the UK was also

being set up to prevent criminals hiding

their wealth, the Foreign Office added.

However, the new act would not be

used for another two years and even then

it was not directed against any London-

based oligarchs. The property register

has still not been made available to the

public. The lack of any concrete action

infuriated many of the MPs on the com-

mittee. “We’ve been consistently moan-

ing about it ever since,” Chris Bryant, a

Labour member, said.

A cabinet minister from that period

recalls that the government was treading

gently around the oligarchs. “It would

have needed Treasury approval [to go

after the oligarchs]... the thinking was

that it’s not very good for the City,” the

former minister said.

A former senior figure in the Foreign

Office believes that the oligarchs’ connec-

tions, money and even popularity made

them difficult targets for government

action. “If you have a lot of money, and

you buy a football team or a newspaper,

you can help yourself in a way that nor-

mal individuals cannot... you have

extra protection and extra access,” he

said. He gave Roman Abramovich, the

owner of Chelsea football club, as an

example: “He [Abramovich] is very pop-

ular in parts of London. And politicians

are sensitive to that popularity.”

There may have even been a personal

reason for the Foreign Office’s failure to

get behind the report. The source said

there was a “very poor relationship”

arming them. And we looked like we had

no political will to stand up to Russia or

indeed to help Ukraine,” he said.

The Salisbury attack prompted a

renewed media focus on the Conserva-

tive Party’s links to wealthy Russians who

were among its funders. That year, 2018,

the party received £700,000 in Russian-

linked donations, the highest sum so far.

Russia was also coming under

increased scrutiny from parliament. An

investigation into the threat posed by the

Kremlin had begun in November 2017 by

the intelligence and security committee.

Part of its remit was to look into allega-

tions of Russian interference in British

politics, including the Brexit and Scottish

independence referendums. “The Rus-

sians want Brexit because they are very

keen to break down the cohesion of west-

ern Europe,” the committee’s chairman,

Dominic Grieve, a Remain supporter,

said at the start of its inquiry.

The foreign affairs committee also

embarked on a shorter and more tar-

geted inquiry in response to the Skripal

attacks. This was to focus on measures to

counter Putin by stopping his Russian

allies from hiding their assets in London.

OFFSHORE HAVENS

One of its first witnesses in late March

2018 was Johnson. He claimed that

“nobody would be happier than me” to

“finger the collar” of “corrupt oligarchs

and distrain them of their possessions in

London”. But he added that he was reluc-

tant to “start a great hue and cry against

certain individuals who might actually

have wealth that was perfectly proper”.

Even the Russian embassy could see

there was a problem — while not acknowl-

edging its own citizens’ involvement. It

wrote in a submission to the committee:

“The willingness of the UK to provide a

‘safe haven’ to criminal money from

around the world has been consistently

criticised by Russia.”

A series of other witnesses to the com-

mittee described the mechanism by

which illicit funds were transferred from

Russia to secretive British offshore

havens and then were used to buy man-

sions in London, shares in companies

and expensive yachts.

The Russian-born anti-corruption

campaigner Roman Borisovich argued

that all the oligarchs had one thing in

common. “They are not self-made busi-

nessmen in the American sense. Every

one of them made money through a rela-

tionship with the Russian government,”

he told the committee. “That bond forces

them to do all sorts of chores for Putin.”

Among the witnesses was Garry Kas-

parov, the chess grandmaster, who

pointed out the cost of appeasing Putin.

“Despite having massive military supe-

riority, the free world has refused to

stand up to Russian aggression, to call

Putin’s bluff,” he said. “This has given

him more and more confidence and

increased his aura of invincibility at

IT WAS NOT

EASY

REACHING OUT

TO DOMINIC

RAAB. I

UNDERSTAND

YOUR

SECRETARIES

ARE BUSY

PEOPLE

Vadym Prystaiko,

Ukraine’s

ambassador to

London

Continued on page 20→

INSIGHT

TEAM

George

Arbuthnott and

Jonathan Calvert

Chamberlain allowing Nazi
Germany to annex parts of
Czechoslovakia in 1938.

December 2017
Johnson becomes the first
minister to visit Moscow for
five years. He lists
“difficulties” over Ukraine
and cyberattacks which
Britain cannot ignore, but
adds: “I am delighted to say
that there are increasing
exports of British Kettle
crisps to Russia and in spite
of all the difficulties I believe
300 Bentleys were sold this
year in Russia.”

January 2018
General Sir Nick Carter, the
chief of the general staff,

British government’s policy

of withholding weapons.

A senior Conservative

source says the UK

“didn’t want to upset the

Russians”.

March 2018

Johnson tells the Commons

intelligence and security

committee that “nobody

would be happier than me”

to “finger the collar” of

“corrupt oligarchs” but

refuses to “start a great hue

and cry against...

individuals who might

actually have wealth that was

perfectly proper”. Garry

Kasparov, the renowned

chess grandmaster, warns

the committee that “the free

agent to kill thousands of

people. There seems little

doubt that the Russian state

is behind the attacks. In

response, Theresa May

expels 23 Russian diplomats.

The Kremlin denies

responsibility.

March 2018

Johnson withdraws his

invitation to Lavrov for a

return meeting in London

and the royal family say they

will boycott the World Cup

finals in Russia.

2018

The American government

begins selling anti-tank

missiles to Ukraine. But

Johnson has reaffirmed the

gives a keynote speech

describing Russia as the

biggest threat to the UK —

adding that Putin “could

initiate hostilities sooner than

we expect”.

March 2018

Sergei Skripal, a former

Russian military intelligence

officer, and his 33-year-old

daughter Yulia are found

foaming at the mouth on a

park bench in the centre of

Salisbury. They have been

poisoned with novichok. The

discarded perfume bottle

with the deadly nerve agent

in it will later kill Dawn

Sturgess, a mother of three

children. The bottle had

contained enough nerve

Russia invaded

Crimea in 2014

and carried out a

poison attack in

Britain in 2018, the

year that Vladimir

Putin played host

to the World Cup

in Moscow

world has refused to stand

up to Russian aggression, to

call Putin’s bluff... this has

given him more and more

confidence”.

May 2018

The committee’s findings are

published. It warns that

Putin’s cronies have hidden

corrupt assets in London and

the Kremlin is able to call

upon these resources to

further its aggressive foreign

policy. It highlights the lack

of action by successive

governments over corrupt

Russian money in London,

which it says is endangering

national security. The

government takes little

concrete action. A cabinet

minister recalls that “the

thinking was that it’s not very

good for the City” to pursue

Russian oligarchs.

September 2018

Johnson admits that his

“thinking it was possible to

have a reset with Russia” and

“wanting to engage with

Putin and Sergey Lavrov” has

been a “classic mistake” and

a “fool’s errand”.

July 2019

Johnson is elected prime

minister.

October 2019

A report on Russia by the

Commons foreign affairs

Continued on page 20→