Jeremy Hunt, British Foreign Secretary has urged the EU to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US administration by imposing more comprehensive sanctions against Russia.

In his first speech since his appointment as foreign secretary, Hunt renewed the British attack on Russian efforts to undermine liberal democracies, saying Vladimir Putin had made the world “a more dangerous place”, and that, after a chemical weapons attack in England, the EU should apply more pressure to protect western democracy from Russian interference and ensure Russia sticks to international rules.

“Today the United Kingdom asks its allies to go further by calling on the European Union to ensure its sanctions against Russia are comprehensive, and that we truly stand shoulder to shoulder with the US,” Hunt told an audience in Washington DC.
“That means calling out and responding to transgressions with one voice whenever and wherever they occur, from the streets of Salisbury to the fate of Crimea.”

Hunt said that international norms are constantly violated by big countries such as Russia. “The 2014 annexation of Crimea was the first case of joining the territories in Europe by use of armed forces after 1945. However, it is a fact that this was not the first territorial intervention by the Kremlin in this century. The first case was intervention in Georgia in 2008,” Hunt said.

He also called for new measures to control potential Russian interference in western democratic elections. “Of course we must engage with Moscow, but we must also be blunt: Russia’s foreign policy under President Putin has made the world a more dangerous place,” he said.