Lavrov’s london based stepdaughter, sanctioned

The London based 26-year-old stepdaughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is up in arms after being sanctioned by the UK government. His daughter Polina Kovaleva, lives in a multi-million pound home after gaining degrees from two British universities.

The measures come in the latest round of economic sanctions against those people with close ties to the Kremlin, Kovaleva being one of 65 individuals and companies who were added to the list on Thursday March 24^th.

Supporters of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who has just been sentenced to a further nine years in prison, named Kovaleva’s mother as the long-time lover of the foreign secretary. They also raised questions as to how she could fund her lavish lifestyle in London.

Surprisingly the government did move earlier with demonstrators having protested outside her flat calling her the “daughter of a war criminal” back in February.

Others added to the list include billionaire oil tycoon Eugene Shvidler, drone manufacturer Kronshtadt, the Russian paramilitary group Wagner and Alrosa, the world’s biggest diamond manufacturer.

Referring to the sanctions, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “We’ve got to step up, we’ve got to increase our support, and we’ve got to tighten the economic vice around Putin, sanctioning more people today.”

Joe Powell, the co-founder of the Kensington Against Dirty Money initiative, welcomed the freezing of Ms Kovaleva’s assets saying: “The government must now ensure that financial trickery is not used to evade these sanctions, for example by placing properties in the names of anonymous trusts.”

Oligarch Alisher Usmanov’s has earlier suggested that he had evaded British sanctions by transferring his British mansions into trusts in his relatives’ names.

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