The United Kingdom was responsible for the First and Second World Wars, and is trying to start the third, Russian spies say, by undermining U.S. President Donald Trump’s push for peace.
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the modern incarnation of the KGB, NKVD, Cheka and others, is falling back on Victorian-era tropes of casting the United Kingdom as the global power-behind-the-curtain manipulating other countries for its own benefit. Moscow even rolled out the time-worn phrase “Perfidious Albion”, coined by the French and later adopted by German wartime propaganda to portray the then-British Empire as duplicitous, manipulating, and power-obsessed.
The accusations come as the United Kingdom marks Commonwealth Day — once known in earlier times as Empire Day — and just hours after Russia expelled two British diplomats they claim were using the British embassy in Moscow as cover for spying against the Federation. Today, peace talks featuring the United States, Russia, and Ukraine are getting underway in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
In a statement the Russian SVR blasted “Perfidious Albion drags the world into war again” and said it was their understanding the British government was reacting very negatively to President Trump’s attempts to broker peace in Europe because that would prevent the alleged greater British foreign policy objective of isolating Russia on the world stage.
They said: “the British leadership sees a threat to its interests in the promotion of dialogue between the United States and Russia on resolving the Ukrainian conflict. London fears that this will lead to the failure of the British strategy of ‘containing’ Moscow, in which control over Ukraine occupies a central place.”
The rebranded KGB agency continued: “In the current situation, the British authorities consider it an ‘urgent priority’ to undermine the ‘peacekeeping’ efforts of the new American administration”.
British media outlets and NGOs have been tasked with demonising President Trump in pursuit of this policy, it is stated.
The somewhat out-of-time “Perfidious Albion” stereotype, presumably meant by the Russian government for domestic consumption as much as global, is apparently part of Moscow’s wider policy of leaning heavily on interpretation of history to interpret the world and justify action. The United States and the United Kingdom in particular have in the recent past been lumped in together by Russia as the “Anglo-Saxon” terrorists responsible for every NATO act, as the allegedly real powers controlling the alliance.
In this case, “treacherous” Britain is accused to having caused both World Wars so far and being on the track to start a third. In closing remarks, the Russian spy agency said: “London today, just as it did on the eve of both world wars of the last century, is acting as the main ‘instigator’ of the global conflict.”
The British, Russia claimed, were hoping to “again” sit out the war “on their island”, a remark certainly underplaying the horrendous impact of mass bombing against British cities in the Second World War. In a conclusion that ambiguously straddled either promising to prevent world war three or threatening Britain to feel the consequences if it starts one, Moscow signed off: “It is time to expose them and send a clear signal to the treacherous Albion and its elites: you will not succeed.”
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