Downing Street used the opening of the G7 summit in Evian, France, on Tuesday 16 June to set out a combined package on Ukraine: tighter sanctions on Russia and a further UK-backed energy supply arrangement for Kyiv. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, the purpose is to sustain Ukraine’s military and civilian resilience into next winter while increasing pressure on the revenues, shipping routes and procurement channels that continue to support Russia’s war.
Keir Starmer is expected to tell G7 leaders that support for Ukraine now needs to move beyond broad political declarations and into practical measures on finance, energy and enforcement. The government said he will argue for a just and lasting peace, an immediate ceasefire, and negotiations starting from the current line of contact. Downing Street also said Starmer had directed officials in recent weeks to increase support across military equipment, vital energy provision and pressure on what it described as Putin’s war machine. The message to partners is that battlefield endurance and economic pressure remain linked.
One of the clearest measures is £210 million of UK Export Finance backing for UK-based Urenco to supply enriched uranium to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear power producer, over the next two years. Downing Street said the arrangement was agreed by Starmer and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their meeting at Downing Street last week. The financing builds on an earlier two-year fuel supply deal. Energoatom produces more than half of Ukraine’s electricity, so continued nuclear fuel supply is being treated not simply as an energy contract but as a resilience measure for the wider war effort.
The government is also presenting the Urenco arrangement as a domestic industrial policy measure. More than a third of the uranium content is due to come from Urenco’s processing plant in the North West of England, and the company says it employs more than 650 people in the UK while supporting a wider supply chain of more than 4,500 jobs. That allows ministers to place the announcement within two policy frames at once: support for Ukraine abroad and support for advanced manufacturing and export capacity at home. For departments concerned with trade and industry, the UKEF role is as important as the foreign policy message.
Alongside the export finance package, ministers are preparing a further round of sanctions due later on 16 June. The government said the measures will target Russia’s shadow fleet, the finance networks used to evade western restrictions, and channels involved in military procurement. Downing Street also said the UK intends to move first on sanctioning several vessels carrying already-sanctioned Russian liquefied natural gas. If the package is made as described, the total number of UK-sanctioned shadow fleet and Russian LNG vessels would rise to more than 600.
The sanctions package is also intended to expose a Russian state-linked procurement network accused of sourcing western technology for the Russian military, and to tighten action on third-country suppliers involved in moving funds around the global financial system. That reflects a broader change in sanctions design, away from headline asset freezes alone and towards shipping, intermediary finance and dual-use supply chains. The practical issue is enforcement. Restrictions of this kind matter only if insurers, ports, banks and compliance teams treat them as operational rules that alter commercial behaviour, rather than as diplomatic signalling.
Downing Street linked the announcement directly to wider European defence planning. Officials pointed to the recent interdiction of the vessel SMYRTOS and said lessons from Ukraine will inform the Defence Investment Plan due before the NATO summit. Taken together, the package shows how the UK government is trying to join sanctions enforcement, export finance, energy security and defence posture into a single Ukraine policy. For policy professionals, the next test will be whether the decisions set out in Evian produce tighter implementation across allied jurisdictions and steadier electricity supply inside Ukraine through the winter.