The UK has imposed sanctions on 370 more Russian individuals, including more than 50 oligarchs and their families with a combined net worth of £100bn, in the latest raft of measures against Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Boris Johnson has compared Vladimir Putin to a drug dealer who managed to hook western nations on Russian supplies of oil and gas, ahead of a trip to the Middle East in an attempt to diversify the sources of Britain’s energy imports. Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, has said the west should not give up on the possibility of negotiating a peace deal with Putin. But, in a long essay posted on his thinktank’s website, he also it was said a mistake for Nato to be as specific as it has been about not getting involved in the war. (See 4.17pm.) Theresa May, the former Conservative prime minister, has urged the government to act to protect Ukrainian refugees from human traffickers. Speaking in a Commons debate on Ukraine, she said: It’s a sad reflection on human nature that the very point where these women and children are fleeing Ukraine for their safety to find refuge elsewhere, the criminal gangs have moved in to make money from the trafficking of what they consider to be yet another commodity, that is human beings, and they are attempting to make money out of this human distress and vulnerability ... There are many unaccompanied children coming over, not necessarily orphans, but children who may not just have their family with them when they come in. Some of those children don’t have papers. The Polish authorities, I understand, are making valiant efforts to look for papers, to find papers, to photograph children, to find some sort of record of the children, to identify them. What we know is that there is no database, there is no real means of that identification and tracking of what is happening to those children. My first ask for ministers is whether they will now work urgently with UN agencies, the European Commission and the tech companies to find a resolution to this issue, to put in place a system that means that there can be no unidentified children left to the mercy of the traffickers. Europol and Interpol almost certainly need to be involved here, as do the various police and law enforcement agencies across Europe. There’ll be an absolutely key role for our National Crime Agency. I believe they should be taking the lead in this. The Speaker of the House of Lords has urged ministers to toughen up the vetting and appointment system for new peers after concerns about the suitability of recent nominees such the Evening Standard proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev. More than 100,000 people have offered homes to Ukrainian refugees in the first 24 hours of a government scheme that allows families and individuals to bring them to the UK. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian national held in Iran, has had her British passport returned, her MP, Tulip Siddiq, has said. The requirement to wear face masks on public transport, in shops and other enclosed public spaces will remain in place in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has said, as a sharp increase in cases driven by the Omicron sub-variant prompted her government to delay scrapping the measure entirely. That is all from me for today. But our Ukraine coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here.