Good morning. Boris Johnson was chairing a meeting of the government’s Cobra emergency committee this morning to discuss the Ukraine crisis and, speaking afterwards, he confirmed that the “first barrage of UK economic sanctions against Russia” in response will be announced today. He also said a further tranche of sanctions would follow if Vladimir Putin were to extend his invasion beyond the enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk, already under Russian control, into the rest of the country. Johnson said:
[The sanctions] will hit Russia very hard and there is a lot more that we are going to do in the event of an invasion.
Be in no doubt that if Russian companies are prevented from raising capital on the UK financial markets, if we unpeel the facade of Russian ownership of companies, of property, it will start to hurt.
Johnson said that Putin had “completely torn up international law” by his actions in Ukraine and that, if he launched a full-scale invasion, it had to fail. The prime minister said:
I just want everybody to be in no doubt that if Vladimir Putin continues down this track of violence, of aggression, of a full-scale invasion, of encircling Kyiv itself, which is what he seems to be proposing to do, capturing the Ukrainian capital, it is absolutely vital that that effort, that conquest of another European country, should not succeed and that Putin should fail.
There is full coverage of the crisis from a global perspective on our Ukraine live blog, which is here.
But the crisis is also dominating UK politics, and I will be covering the British reaction here. Here is the agenda for the day.
After 12.30pm: Boris Johnson makes a statement to MPs on Russia and Ukraine.
2pm: George Eustice, the environment secretary, gives a speech at the National Farmers’ Union conference.
2.20pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minster, makes a statement to MSPs on Covid.
Also today Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, is hosting a meeting of the defence ministers of the Joint Expeditionary Force nations in Leicestershire.
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