Britain has added seven people involved in Russia's program of forced deportation and "re-education" of Ukrainian children to its sanctions list, including Movement of the First board chairman Artur Orlov and Olena Milska, head of the Russian National Center for Assistance to Missing and Affected Children, Bring Kids Back UA said.
"The sanctions also hit five heads of the movement's regional branches in the temporarily occupied territories of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions and in Crimea: Denys Chernobay, Ruyal Aliyev, Oleksiy Lavrentiev, Viktoriya Kostromina and Kateryna Kozyr," it said in a press release provided to Interfax-Ukraine.
Sanctions were also imposed on Milska, chair of the board of trustees of the Russian National Center for Assistance to Missing and Affected Children. According to Ukrainian intelligence, in October 2022 she used the center's volunteers as cover for the mass abduction and illegal deportation of Ukrainian children, including orphans, from occupied territories to Krasnodar region via occupied Crimea.
The sanctions provide for an asset freeze, a ban on entering Britain, restrictions on trust services and a ban on serving as a company director.
At least three of the seven, Orlov, Chernobay and Milska, were previously sanctioned by Canada, and Milska is also under EU sanctions, the release said.
Britain also sanctioned eight more people for arbitrary detention, torture and cruel treatment of civilians in temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories, including in the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. They include Viktor Bedryk, military commandant of occupied Kherson region, and the heads of the occupation police and of the civilian detention site in Kamianka-Dniprovska.
"These people are already under Canadian sanctions, and now British ones. When the same names appear on lists in different countries, they have fewer places to hide money or hide themselves. We call on other partners to synchronize their decisions: for those who deport and militarize Ukrainian children, no safe jurisdiction should remain," Presidential Commissioner for Sanctions Policy Vladyslav Vlasiuk said.
Britain introduced a new package of sanctions against Russia on October 1, aimed in particular at its shadow fleet. Restrictions were imposed on eight vessels and 23 individuals and entities, the British government said on Thursday.
The sanctions target, among others, shadow fleet vessels, Kremlin disinformation networks and people involved in the torture of Ukrainian civilians and the indoctrination of Ukrainian children, it said.
