In Kremlin demonology, a category almost indistinguishable from Russian spy agency demonology, it is Britain that wears the Devil’s face, and Britain that works unceasingly to damage Russia’s national interests.
Where the US was referred to as the Main Enemy throughout the Cold War period, a less hostile approach from the Trump administration has caused the regime’s eyes to wander elsewhere in search of an alternative villain.
It’s fair to say most Britons have little grasp of just how much their country is hated in Moscow, and just how often the Kremlin’s propagandists mock their country and fantasize about its humbling. If London had suffered a nuclear attack the number of times it has been dreamed by Russian state TV, it would glow for millennia in the nighttime sky.
One January evening, guests on Russia’s most popular chat show heard this: “England is a . . . more systemic enemy of ours. Therefore, perhaps I would still deliver the first strike there. Moreover, it might not even have to be with nuclear weapons. [The nuclear-armed] Poseidon [torpedo] is enough — and goodbye. The main thing afterwards is that our ships don’t scrape Big Ben with their hulls,” said one of state TV’s talking heads.
Evidence of this loathing was underlined on June 15, when Ukrainian men recruited by a 23-year-old Russian spy were convicted of setting fire to cars and homes linked to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The BBC and other UK media ran long stories revealing Russia’s hand in the 2025 attacks.
Part of this is history — the British Secret Service waged an extraordinarily effective campaign against Russia after the 1917 revolution, teaching lessons that Moscow’s spies have never forgotten. But there’s much more to it than that.
The UK is seen as the organizing hand behind Russian failure, especially in Ukraine. And yet, while this is a regular and repeated theme from propagandists and their Kremlin masters alike, they also mock the UK, at some length.
That isn’t especially difficult at the moment. On the one hand, the UK government warns of rising threats and the risks of being under-armed when a crisis arrives, and on the other, it rejects plans by its own Ministry of Defence to address the problem. That resulted in ministerial resignations on June 11 and widespread attacks on Starmer’s administration for downplaying the perils the nation faces.
Russia began a new campaign to frame the UK as its main threat while simultaneously mocking its fighting capability, soon after its foreign minister Sergey Lavrov sat down with Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Steve Witkoff, and others in Riyadh in February 2025.
The story being fed to Russian audiences is now remarkably consistent. Britain is presented as the real author of Ukraine’s war effort. London is described as the place where escalation is plotted, where peace talks are sabotaged, where President Zelenskyy is supposedly instructed to keep fighting, and where Europe’s more cautious governments are bullied into line. In this version of events, the UK is falsely accused of directing the war from behind the curtain.
This is paired with another message: Britain is finished. Its army is too small, its navy overstretched, its weapons stocks depleted, its economy exhausted, its public weak, its politics unserious. Russian television can move in the space of a few minutes from claiming Britain controls the battlefield, to laughing that Britain cannot defend its own coastline.
That contradiction is not a flaw. It is the mechanism. The UK is large enough to hate and weak enough to be worth threatening.
The “Anglo-Saxons” are blamed for almost everything useful to Moscow’s narrative: Ukraine refusing surrender, Europe rearming, sanctions continuing, NATO cohesion surviving, and any Western reluctance to accept Russia’s terms as reality. Britain is cast as uniquely malicious because it is a convenient villain — old empire, nuclear power, close to Washington, active on Ukraine, and familiar enough to Russian audiences to carry historical weight.
The propaganda also gives Moscow a way to separate Britain and its nuclear weapons from Europe. Germany and France are often portrayed as countries that might otherwise be pragmatic, if only London (and sometimes Washington) would stop poisoning the room. That matters. The point is to make Britain look like the spoiler, not the defender of a European security order. It invites Europeans to see the UK as reckless and invites Russians to see it as a legitimate target.
This would be easier to dismiss if the Russian state treated its own propaganda as mere performance. It does not. The system eats its own dog food.
The Kremlin’s television studios, security services, and political leadership feed each other the same stories until fantasy hardens into assumption. By the time it reaches decision-makers, the line between messaging and belief has blurred. This leads to grave miscalculations like the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where Russia has been fought to a bloody standstill.
That is why the rhetoric matters. Russia does not need to believe every word that comes from the mouth of the state-decorated mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov for it to absorb the general lesson: Britain is hostile, decadent, overextended, and vulnerable. A state that believes this — even partly — will test it.
Moscow has always ruthlessly exploited weakness. It probes, waits, escalates, then calls the response hysteria. It looks for gaps between what countries say and what they can do.
Starmer is now creating one of those gaps.
The 2025 Strategic Defence Review understood the problem. It pointed to the realities made obvious in Ukraine: the need for drones, electronic warfare, air defense, stockpiles, industrial capacity, and resilience. These are not luxuries. They are the grammar of modern war.
But reviews do not deter anyone. Capability does.
If Britain says Russia is a serious threat, then refuses to fund the tools needed to meet it, Moscow will draw the obvious conclusion. Not that Britain is restrained. Not that Britain is sensible. That Britain is weak.
The resignations of senior defense ministers should therefore be treated as a warning. They expose the distance between the language of national security and the political commitment to build it.
Russia’s threats against Britain are theatrical, but that does not make them harmless. Theater is part of the method. It shapes expectations, softens audiences, and makes escalation feel normal before it happens. Big Ben underwater is a joke until it becomes a worldview.
Britain should not answer Russian hysteria with empty rhetoric. It should answer with seriousness. It needs to fund hybrid capabilities, rebuild stockpiles, strengthen air and missile defense, while also investing in drones and electronic warfare at speed. It must stop believing that deterrence can be bought after the crisis starts. It must properly communicate the threat to its public.
The Kremlin has chosen Britain as a villain because it thinks Britain matters. It mocks Britain because it thinks Britain does not have the stomach to matter for much longer.
Andy Pryce is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a former British diplomat and a globally recognized expert in countering information threats, cognitive defense, and strategic communications. He brings decades of leadership advising governments and organizations on crisis management, countering foreign information manipulation, and impact in contested information spaces. As a diplomat, Andy led national efforts to counter foreign information manipulation, establishing innovative capabilities to anticipate, analyze, mitigate, and disrupt malign state actors and their proxies. His senior diplomatic roles included Head of Public Diplomacy at the British Embassy in Washington and at the UK Mission to the EU in Brussels.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
