FACT CHECK Government has not backed up Russian sanction claims
On 5 March 2022 a number of Conservative MPs, including the Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, tweeted a chart claiming that the value of Russian bank assets sanctioned by the UK was higher than those sanctioned by either the US or the EU.
The graph shows £258.8 billion worth of Russian bank assets sanctioned by the UK, compared with £240 billion by the US and £38.8 billion by the EU. It’s not clear who first created the chart, but the Cabinet Office told us the figures were produced by the Foreign Office.
However, we don’t know exactly what these figures refer to, how they were calculated, and we cannot find any evidence of the Foreign Office having published this data.
This means we can’t say what these statistics truly represent, whether they are reliable, or whether they are comparablewith each other. We don’t know whether the figures only cover assets sanctioned since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or what criteria have been used to count assets affected by the different sanctions.
The UK Statistics Authority says: “Policy, press or ministerial statements referring to regular or ad hoc official statistics should be issued separately from, and contain a prominent link to, the source statistics. The statements should meet basic professional standards of statistical presentation, including accuracy, clarity and impartiality.”
In last week's PMQs, Boris Johnson claimed the UK has 'taken more vulnerable people fleeing theatres of conflict since 2015 than any other country in Europe'. He made a very similar claim again this week. But this is missing important context.
Data from the EU shows that the UK resettled 25,000 people between 2015 and 2019. This is more than any other country in Europe. But “resettled” in this context has a very specific meaning. It only refers to refugees who have been granted protection in a country through a dedicated resettlement scheme, and ignores the hundreds of thousands of people who have been granted asylum after arriving in another country.
Outside of official resettlement schemes, other countries in the EU have offered protection to far more people claiming asylum.
Germany accepted by far the highest number of first instance asylum applications in the EU, with 982,695 positive decisions between 2015 and 2019. In comparison, the UK made 57,560 positive decisions over the same period of time.
We’ll soon be calling on your support to help ensure that the Online Safety Bill protects people from harmful misinformation and protects freedom of expression online. We need to see proportionate action against online harms with careful democratic oversight of the government’s actions in this area.
Last month we warned that the draft of the Bill does not set out a credible plan to tackle the harms from online misinformation and disinformation. We set out our ten recommendations for the Online Safety Bill so that it can live up to its promise of making the UK the safest place in the world to be online.
An image that’s been shared 5,000 times on Facebook claims to show members of Ukraine’s Dynamo Kyiv football team in military uniform, armed with weapons. The image appears to be a screenshot of a tweet, in which the user goes on to claim: “Yesterday they were in their jerseys, today they are protecting their country”.
But the photo doesn’t show the Dynamo Kyiv football squad. Reuters spoke to Dynamo Kyiv’s social media manager who confirmed that none of the men in the photograph are squad members. An activist who is pictured in the photograph, told the news agency they are members of the right-wing Ukrainian nationalist group Gonor, not FC Dynamo.
While this photograph has been miscaptioned, there have been other genuine reports of Ukrainian sportspeople joining the armed forces to fight the Russian invasion.
