The EU added Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich to an asset freeze and travel ban list. Alfa Group shareholders German Khan and Alexey Kuzmichev have also been placed under sanctions. Tigran Khudaverdyan, executive director of Yandex, one of Russia’s leading tech companies, is also blacklisted for being one of the business people with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s top businessmen in the Kremlin’s ornate Hall of the Order of St Catherine to discuss their response to sanctions. The Russian president seated about 20ft away in a conspicuous social-distancing measure. Putin told them he would have no other choice but to invade Ukraine and if they wanted to keep their businesses, neither did they.