{"id":266034,"date":"2025-11-16T12:32:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T12:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/266034\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T12:32:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T12:32:07","slug":"how-britain-replaced-the-us-as-russias-villain-of-choice-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/266034\/","title":{"rendered":"How Britain replaced the US as Russia\u2019s villain of choice | Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years, Britain has become the villain of choice in Moscow\u2019s eyes. It has been accused of plotting drone strikes on Russian airfields, blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, directing \u201cterrorist\u201d raids inside Russia<\/a>, and even abetting last year\u2019s gruesome Islamic State concert attack in Moscow.<\/p>\n

This week, a new charge was added to the pile: Russian authorities claimed that British intelligence had tried and failed to lure Russian pilots into defecting to the west.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FSB [Russia\u2019s Federal Security Service] exposed all this in great detail,\u201d Sergei Lavrov, Russia\u2019s foreign minister, told reporters in Moscow, describing what he called a British-backed plot to lure a Russian pilot flying a Kinzhal missile-equipped jet to Romania, where, he claimed, it would be shot down by Nato forces.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not know how the British will wash themselves clean of it, although their ability to play the role of goose coming out of the shower is well known,\u201d Lavrov added, using a Russian idiom that cast Britain as somehow always emerging spotless, despite its actions.<\/p>\n

London denies involvement in all these plots.<\/p>\n

A Kinzhal missile-equipped-jet of the type that Nato allegedly planned to shoot down over Romania, according to Sergei Lavror. Photograph: Pavel Golovkin\/AP<\/p>\n

As Moscow looks to rebuild ties with the Donald Trump administration, Britain has assumed the role once reserved for the US \u2013 the Kremlin\u2019s chief adversary and favoured bogeyman in its propaganda war.<\/p>\n

\u201cRussia regards itself as on a par with the United States,\u201d said Capt John Foreman, the UK\u2019s former defence attach\u00e9 to Moscow. \u201cNow they can\u2019t criticise Trump directly, so who do you blame for your woes \u2013 for the losses in Ukraine<\/a>, for a million casualties? You blame the closest thing, the British. It\u2019s easy to portray us as the root of all Russia\u2019s problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year, Russia\u2019s foreign intelligence service (SVR) said: \u201cLondon today, like on the eve of both world wars, is acting as the main global warmonger\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is a mantle Britain has worn on and off for more than two centuries, in Russia\u2019s view.<\/p>\n

From Moscow\u2019s perspective, the UK is more isolated than at any time since 1914 and can be picked offProf Michael Clarke<\/p>\n

During the cold war, the US was known in KGB parlance as the \u201cmain enemy\u201d, with Britain a distant second. Although rivalry and mutual spying between the two never went away, in the minds of the Kremlin the threat from Britain was very much a subplot to the main battle between Moscow and Washington.<\/p>\n

But rivalry between Russia and Britain has a long history, stretching back to the \u201cGreat Game\u201d of the 19th century, when imperial Russia and Britain fought for influence in central Asia, where their empires came within 20 miles of one another in some places.<\/p>\n

There was a brief period when the empires were allies, but after the October Revolution of 1917, Britain again became the primary antagonist, seen by the Marxist Bolsheviks as the leading power representing the old capitalist and imperialist order.<\/p>\n

The US at this time was a mere afterthought; the early Soviet foreign intelligence service covered the country from its British department, \u201cas it was an Anglo-Saxon country and because it did not bother us much anyway\u201d, in the words of Georges Agabekov, an intelligence officer who later defected.<\/p>\n

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, however, has brought relations to a new low.<\/p>\n

Although Britain\u2019s budget and capabilities are much smaller than those of the US, the British have often been far more willing than their American counterparts to take risks and push boundaries when it comes to assisting Ukraine militarily and with intelligence sharing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Brits have been one step ahead from the very first days,\u201d a Ukrainian intelligence source said.<\/p>\n

Boris Johnson was one of the first western leaders to visit Kyiv after the invasion, arriving in early April 2022 just 10 days after Russian forces had withdrawn from positions around the capital. It was February 2023 before Joe Biden made his own visit. US officials signed off on massive support for Ukraine, but they were wary of escalation, whereas Johnson frequently used bullish rhetoric about the defeat of Russia, which did not go unnoticed in Moscow.<\/p>\n

Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, have repeatedly seized on claims that Johnson derailed a potential peace deal in the spring of 2022. In Moscow\u2019s telling, Kyiv was ready to agree to terms early in the war but pulled out on British orders \u2013 a version of events rejected by President Volodomyr Zelenskyy but now embedded in Russian state media.<\/p>\n

\u201cPockets of anglophobia really do exist within the security services, among people like [Nikolai] Patrushev, [Alexander] Bortnikov and [Sergei] Naryshkin,\u201d said Foreman, referring to three of Russia\u2019s most powerful siloviki, members of the security establishment.<\/p>\n

Among Russia\u2019s ruling elite, the once-innocuous term \u201cAnglo-Saxons\u201d has been reborn as shorthand for the Kremlin\u2019s deepest anxieties about the west. In the official lexicon, it no longer denotes an ancient people but a geopolitical cabal, led this time by London and accused of plotting to contain, humiliate and ultimately dismantle Russia.<\/p>\n

The hostility has trickled down from the top. Russia\u2019s television propagandists now compete to issue ever more lurid threats: one of Putin\u2019s favoured hosts regularly boasts that Britain could be \u201csunk underwater\u201d by Russia\u2019s new nuclear torpedo.<\/p>\n

Public opinion has followed suit. According to a Levada Centre poll this summer, 49% of Russians name Britain as one of their country\u2019s main enemies, second only to Germany.<\/p>\n

But this hatred appears to have gone largely unnoticed in Britain itself, Foreman said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey care about us much more than we care about them,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a reciprocal relationship; the average Brit on the street has no idea this hate exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adding to the confusion, Moscow\u2019s messaging is often contradictory, depicting Britain as a fading colonial relic as well as as a power with outsized sway over world affairs.<\/p>\n

\u201cSoviet leaders then, and Russian leaders now, pay the UK an inverted compliment in professing to believe that London is behind every conspiracy against them,\u201d Michael Clarke, a visiting professor of defence studies at King\u2019s College London, wrote<\/a> in a recent issue of the British Army Review.<\/p>\n

\u201cBritish intelligence remains a favourite b\u00eate noire for analysts in Russia,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

At the same time, as a recent paper by the New Eurasian Strategies Research thinktank put it, Britain is portrayed<\/a> in Moscow \u201cas a weakened power, a puppet of the United States, and a society in moral and social decay\u201d.<\/p>\n

A British-made Husky support vehicle at a Russian ministry of defence exhibition in Moscow of military equipment captured from the Ukrainian army. Photograph: Anadolu\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Britain is not alone in the Kremlin\u2019s gallery of enemies. Since Trump\u2019s election, Europe<\/a> as a whole has joined the ranks \u2013 no longer the loyal Washington follower but, in Moscow\u2019s telling, the real source of western aggression and instability.<\/p>\n

Still, the UK appears to occupy a special place.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t like Europe, but they really hate the Brits, that\u2019s the message that comes through when talking to the Russians,\u201d said a senior European diplomat in Moscow, who requested anonymity to speak freely.<\/p>\n

What Britain\u2019s enemy status means for actual Russian policy vis-a-vis the UK is hard to gauge.<\/p>\n

The UK is not unique in accusing Moscow of conducting a far-reaching hybrid campaign on its territory. Across Europe, intelligence services have blamed Moscow for sabotage, arson and disinformation operations, part of what they describe as a coordinated campaign against the continent.<\/p>\n

But diplomatically, Moscow appears uniquely unwilling to engage with London, even through private channels. The Financial Times reported this week that London has tried, without success, to establish a discreet line of communication, while the Kremlin has proved more receptive to Berlin and Paris.<\/p>\n

Pavel Baev, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, suggested this may be because military support for Ukraine enjoys broad backing among the British public and across the political spectrum, whereas in other European countries it is more contested.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result,\u201d Baev said, \u201cMoscow is focusing more on Germany and France as potential channels for derailing European rearmament plans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clarke noted that Moscow\u2019s hostility is sharpened by what it sees as Britain\u2019s strategic vulnerability: a country aligned with Europe yet standing outside it, and increasingly isolated from it.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoscow perceives that the UK isolated itself from its European partners in the Brexit process and will take some time to recover the political ground it lost among the major European powers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Clarke wrote, Britain has struggled to maintain a renewed strategic partnership with the US, finding it difficult to sustain close ties under the Trump and Biden administrations.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo from Moscow\u2019s perspective, the UK is more isolated than at any time since 1914, and can be picked off.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In recent years, Britain has become the villain of choice in Moscow\u2019s eyes. It has been accused of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-266034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}