My right hon. Friend makes a good point. If the scenario that plays out is the first of the ones that I described, there will be little opportunity to introduce further sanctions, because this may be all that Putin intends to do.
I want to make a last point on the specifics of the package that was announced, and I am afraid that I will repeat the comments of right hon. and hon. Members across the House. The banks that have been chosen are relatively minor. I worked as a corporate lawyer, including in Russia, and these are not the primary banks that international institutions, major corporations or the major oligarchs go to to seek finance, so the impact will be relatively limited. I have not seen the latest debates from the United States, but when I last looked at them, our colleagues and friends in the US Senate, for example, were looking at pursuing some of the larger banks such as SberBank. If we were going to make any impact, it would be important to bring forward measures against one, two or more of the larger banks, which are genuinely those that major institutions and the oligarchs whose names have been mentioned in this House today are more likely to use for finance.
Secondly, the list of individuals is very small, and the lion’s share of them have already been sanctioned for a long time by the United States. There are many others we could reach. In my work as a lawyer and in business, as managing director of Christie’s, I had the pleasure—if we can call it that—of meeting a number of the individuals who have been described today as oligarchs. Those individuals are not on the list. There is a much larger group of individuals we could and should now be reaching, and we could tackle them in a range of ways. In many respects, what they most fear is losing the ability to travel—to leave Russia and go skiing in France or Switzerland or shopping in London or Paris. It does not have to be a full sanction, but the list that we are currently considering is far too small.
If we were sitting in the same room as the Russian leadership today, I think we would see a very nonplussed reaction. There is more we can and should do. I hope that further measures will be brought forward in the coming days; I certainly stand ready, as I think all colleagues across the House do, to support them.
6.30 pm