Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a former KGB agent who was given a peerage by Boris Johnson, has insisted he is not a security risk, as the UK imposed sanctions against hundreds of Russian politicians, accusing them of being complicit in the invasion of Ukraine.
After new concerns were raised over the scrutiny process behind Lord Lebedev’s peerage, the media magnate issued a statement through one of the newspaper he owns, the Evening Standard, in which he dismissed the “farcical” speculation as Russophobia.
He said some of the “incredible questions” posed to him by journalists were absurd as he denied being an “agent of Russia”. He also condemned the invasion of Ukraine and called on Vladimir Putin to withdraw his troops.
“At the moment many with Russian roots are under scrutiny, including myself,” Lebedev wrote. “I understand the reason for this as it is inevitable when events of such magnitude occur and the world order as we have known it in recent decades suddenly gets torn up.”
Johnson was this week forced to deny he intervened to secure a peerage for Lebedev after intelligence services warned it would be a security risk, after reports in the Guardian and Sunday Times.
Lebedev, who joined the House of Lords in November 2020 as a crossbencher, said he was “not a security risk to this country, which I love” and that while his father had been a KGB agent, he was “not some agent of Russia”.
“Being Russian does not automatically make one an enemy of the state, and it is crucial we do not descend into Russophobia, like any other phobia, bigotry or discrimination,” Lebedev added.
It came hours after the Foreign Office imposed sanctions on a further 386 members of the Russian parliament’s lower house – the Duma – taking the total number targeted so far to 400 of its 450 members.
The move came in response to a vote last month that recognised the independence of self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, and authorised the permanent presence of Russian military in the two regions.
The UK government had been under pressure to act for some time, given the EU issued sanctions against those Duma members who supported the incursion on 23 February.
The UK had previously vowed to punish members of the Russian parliament’s upper house – the Federation Council – with similar sanctions.
David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, welcomed the move but said it should have happened weeks ago. He called for the government to “urgently implement” other sanctions to “cut Putin and his criminal cronies out of our economic system”.
Labour has called for further action, including extending sanctions to cover wealth held in the name of family members of those already targeted; removing Belarusian banks from the international Swift payment system; and imposing limits on Russians depositing money into UK bank accounts.
Layla Moran, the foreign affairs spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said the UK was “moving at a snail’s pace” and that only 18 oligarchs had been sanctioned, meaning “hundreds of Putin’s cronies are still getting away with it”.
She said: “Every second wasted is another opportunity for them to take off in their private jets and flee to a safe haven. We need to sanction the lot and seize their assets now.”
On Thursday, the UK announced sanctions against seven Russian oligarchs, including the Chelsea football club owner, Roman Abaramovich, with an estimated combined worth of £15bn.
The other businesspeople accused of having “blood on their hands” were Abramovich’s one-time business partner Oleg Deripaska; Putin’s “right-hand man” Igor Sechin; and four men in the Russian president’s “inner circle”: Andrey Kostin, Alexei Miller, Nikolai Tokarev and Dmitri Lebedev.
