The EU has frozen the assets and imposed a travel ban on more than half a dozen of Russia’s most prominent oligarchs, many of them with close ties to President Vladimir Putin, as it penalises some of the country’s most powerful people following the invasion of Ukraine.

The individuals hit by the measures include Mikhail Fridman, the founder of Alfa Group, and fellow shareholder Petr Aven; Igor Sechin and Nikolai Tokarev, the respective chief executives of oil companies Rosneft and Transneft; and financier Alisher Usmanov.

The blacklistings, which take immediate effect, are the latest in a round of increasingly punitive sanctions that the EU began implementing last week as it seeks ways of damaging the Russian economy and hampering Putin’s war effort. Measures imposed by the US and western allies against the Russian central bank led to a steep decline in the Russian rouble as well as frantic cash withdrawals by Russian citizens.