British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she will travel to Washington, DC on Tuesday to meet her US counterpart, Anthony Blinken.
The United Kingdom will “forge ahead” by “weakening” the Russian economy along with its allies, Truss said at a briefing on Tuesday ahead of a US visit.
“We (…) are working with our allies to undermine the Russian economy, stop funding that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin uses for his war machine. We have imposed sanctions on the Russian central bank, on the SWIFT system, we have frozen bank assets, and in fact the UK is freezing more banking assets than any other country, we have frozen a total of 364 billion ($478 billion) in the value of assets. We have also closed UK airspace to Russian aircraft and also closed our ports to Russian ships,” Truss said.
Now is not the time to give up. We need to keep moving forward in our support for Ukraine and the weakening of the Russian economy,” Truss said.
“Oil and gas (are) important, and we are working with the G7 in terms of creating a schedule to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas, and we need to go further in banks, we need to completely eliminate access to the SWIFT system. we need to freeze more banking assets,” Truss added.
“It is important that we remain strong and united with our allies, and it is important that we ensure that Putin loses in Ukraine. The consequences of not losing are just terrible to imagine,” she warned.
Truss said Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “undermined European security” and now the UK and its allies are “in a battle for information with Russia.” The Foreign Secretary said that as a result, the UK has re-established an information unit that had been abandoned since the end of the Cold War.
Truss said that in addition to weakening the Russian economy, the UK’s strategy is also to provide defensive weapons and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as well as isolating Russia diplomatically.
“Together with our G7 allies, we are working to encourage more of these countries to provide defensive weapons in support of Ukraine and to encourage more of these countries to join us in imposing sanctions against Russia. And it is important that countries such as Switzerland, South Korea, Singapore joined these efforts,” she said.
“I’m going to America to advance this agenda and I think it’s important to note that global security is indivisible, what’s good for the Euro-Atlantic region is good for the Indo-Pacific region, and a strong NATO will help deter aggressors everywhere. And that is why we need to intensify our efforts to strengthen European security together with our allies in Europe, including the EU and our NATO allies, as well as with the United States and allies like Japan,” Truss said.