Putin's war machine in 'freefall' as new UK sanctions kick in

Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Finance and Security (CFS) at defence thinktank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said that the UK and its allies must take more drastic action against the Russian war economy and had been too slow to originally impose the measures. “We continue to take sanctions enforcement less seriously than the Kremlin takes sanctions evasion,” he said, saying the West should impose an all-out ban on Russian oil exports. “In a way, we’ve missed the opportunity to really damage the Russian economy because we moved so slowly originally… and we’re now trying to play catch-up. They’ve now adapted in a way that means that we haven’t got that much to put the screws on anymore.”