Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on his country’s banks to begin operations in the annexed territories of Ukraine. “What they feared in the past, the sanctions, has long since happened. Why be afraid?” Putin said on Wednesday in Moscow at a meeting on the social and economic development of the region. “You have to go to these areas more actively and work there,” he said, according to the Russian TASS agency. Russia annexed the Ukrainian Crimea peninsula in 2014. After the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow also declared the Ukrainian administrative regions of Do…