EU targets Putin’s daughters in new sanctions

UK and EU sanction two of Vladimir Putin’s daughters days after the US imposed restrictions on the pair

The EU has targeted Vladimir Putin’s daughters in its latest raft of sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, two officials have said.

The bloc has banned Maria Vorontsova and her younger sister Katerina Tikhonova from travel and has frozen their assets.

Shortly after the EU’s announcement on Friday, the UK said it had also added the two women to its sanctions list.

The moves come two days after the US sanctioned the pair, whose mother is Mr Putin’s former wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva.

“We believe that many of Putin’s assets are hidden with family members, and that’s why we’re targeting them,” a senior US official said on Wednesday.

Washington also imposed financial restrictions on the family of Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and on major Russian banks.

Ms Vorontsova, 36, the eldest of the Russian president’s daughters, works as a paediatric endocrinologist. She is thought to live in Moscow with her Dutch husband Jorrit Faassed.

Her younger sister Katerina, 35, is an academic, who runs Innopraktika, a $1.7 billion (£1.3 billion) project to create a science centre at Moscow State University. Ms Tikhonova is also deputy director of the university’s Institute for Mathematical Research of Complex Systems.

After it had sanctioned them, the US explained that Ms Vorontsova “leads state-funded programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin towards genetics research and are personally overseen by Putin”, while it described Ms Tikhonova as a “technology executive whose work supports the GoR [Russian government] and defence industry”.

The EU’s fifth package of measures in retaliation for Russia’s war not only included sanctions on individuals but also an embargo on coal imports.

It is the first EU sanction targeting Russia’s lucrative energy industry over its invasion of Ukraine, with Russian coal imports estimated to be worth 4 billion euros (£3.3 billion) per year, the EU presidency said.

The EU’s measures also prevent many Russian vessels and trucks from accessing the bloc, further crippling trade, and will ban all transactions with four Russian banks, including VTB.

The 27-nation bloc has already started working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, said: “These latest sanctions were adopted following the atrocities committed by Russian armed forces in Bucha and other places under Russian occupation.

“The aim of our sanctions is to stop the reckless, inhuman and aggressive behavior of the Russian troops and make clear to the decision makers in the Kremlin that their illegal aggression comes at a heavy cost.”