West must hit Russian economy even harder, says Liz Truss
The west has frozen more than $350bn (£266bn) of Russia’s $604bn foreign currency reserves, Liz Truss said on Tuesday.
Britain’s foreign secretary revealed on the second day of her visit to Warsaw that 60% of Moscow’s reserves were now unavailable to it, slightly higher than recent calculations. It follows US Treasury moves on Monday to make it harder for Russia to pay back its dollar-denominated debt.
But Truss, speaking alongside the Polish foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, said the west urgently needed to go further and faster to damage the Russian economy, saying: “The only way to end this war is for Vladimir Putin to lose in Ukraine.”
She warned: “Although Russian troops have been defeated in their initial assault on Kyiv, there has been no change in their intent and ambition. We are seeing Putin’s forces set their sights on the east and south of Ukraine, with the same reckless disregard for civilian lives and their nationhood.”
Poland is probably the UK’s closest European ally in the war with Ukraine, and on her two-day visit Truss met the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki. On Monday he criticised the French president, Emmanuel Macron, for talking to Putin, saying no one talked to Hitler. Truss has increasingly been setting a high bar for the lifting of the west’s sanctions on Russia, a move that is welcomed in Poland.
In the wake of alleged Russian war crimes, the UK has joined Poland and Ukraine in pressing the G7 – including Germany, France and Italy – to set out specific timetables to end their dependency on oil, gas and coal.
It is expected that the EU will be willing to take measures on coal and oil but not gas, since the infrastructure is not in place to end the dependency on Russian gas imports.
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