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Eight people have been arrested after protesting at a London mansion linked to an oligarch. 

Sadiq Khan has also subtly taken aim at the Met for the amount of police resources dedicated to protecting the property of a billionaire.

Activists broke into a £25 million Belgravia house tied to Oleg Deripaska, a businessman hit by sanctions because of his ties to Vladimir Putin.

The group declared the house ‘belongs to Ukrainian refugees’ and hung banners from the balcony. 

Signs reading ‘this property has been liberated’ and ‘Putin go f*** yourself’ were displayed alongside a Ukrainian flag.

The protest started at around 1am on Monday and it took nearly a full day to remove the small group.

Four people were arrested inside the property and another four were detained outside.

Police wearing riot gear used a drill to break open the front door and enter the house.

The activists refused to come out after speaking to officers lifted to the balcony on a JCB crane, saying they wanted to be ‘treated the same way as Boris Johnson’ and given a questionnaire rather than be arrested.

A huge number of police officers were on the scene throughout the day and the entire street was cordoned off.

Sadiq Khan said he intended to raise the scale of the response with Met leadership, saying it was ‘unclear what the police were responding to’.

The Labour politician said he did not ‘condone’ the actions taken by the squatters but questioned whether the police move against them had been ‘proportionate’.

The squatters called themselves the London Mahknovists, after Nestor Makhno, who led an anarchist force that attempted to form a stateless society in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution of 1917-23.

The mayor expressed frustration at the time taken by the UK government to ‘seize’ property in the capital owned by people with links to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

He told Andrew Marr on LBC: ‘We know that there are many properties owned in London by people close to Putin.

‘One of my concerns is, we’ve had a number of weeks now to seize those homes, to allow them to be used by refugees. They haven’t.

‘I don’t condone the actions of the squatters but they’ve decided to take the law into their own hands.’

Mr Deripaska was one of seven oligarchs, including Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, who was added to the UK sanctions list last week in reaction to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

His wealth is estimated to be £2.3 billion and he has a multimillion-pound property portfolio in the UK which includes the house at 5 Belgrave Square, according to a 2007 High Court judgment.

Records indicate it has not changed hands since and is owned by an offshore British Virgin Islands company.

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