Moscow’s enemy number one

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1:21Over the last few years, Kremlin watchers have become accustomed to Moscow's adversarial rhetoric. The collective West is a frequently used catch-all term for Russia's enemy. Once led by the US, it now seems to have a new flag bearer. Ever since Trump's re-election, we've seen a real acceleration in the anti-British rhetoric on Russian TV.

1:51Britain has been referred to as the puppet masters of the Ukrainian security services. The UK is supposedly on this multi-year campaign to ensure the strategic defeat of Russia. The UK is accused of all sorts of terrorism and sabotage in Russia as well. The anti-British rhetoric may sound theatrical, and Britain denies the accusations. But beneath it all lies a troubling signal, one that UK military chiefs take seriously. This is the most dangerous time I have known in my working life. And the risks and threats to this country are greater than I have known since the Cold War. Russian propagandists are recasting their enemies, softening their tone on the US, while turning Britain into their main target.

2:42In this episode, we explore what's driving this shift, and what does it reveal about Russia's wartime intentions.

2:55Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Krasi Ivanova-Twig, and this is the global jigsaw from BBC Monitoring, where we look at the world through the lens of its media, exploring the narratives, the propaganda and the disinformation.

3:31Since BBC Monitoring was founded on the eve of the Second World War, our Russia team has been plugged into Moscow's media machine 24-7, recently observing the revival of the adversarial language of the Cold War era. My colleague Bryn Windsor, who is a Kremlin watcher, will give us the logic, the background and the flavour of this story. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the narrative has always been that Russia is fighting not just Ukraine, but the whole Western world. It's an easy narrative for the Kremlin because it not only helps mobilise support for the war, but it also justifies to the Russian people why this war that was supposed to last just a few days is now in its fifth year.

4:13And at the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, Russian media really presented the USA as the leader of the collective West. And so that was all well and good for the Kremlin propaganda for the first few years of the war. And then in late 2024, they were presented with somewhat of a problem. And that was the re-election of Donald Trump. Now, as we're all aware, Donald Trump has been pursuing this kind of rapprochement of sorts with Moscow. And we had the big Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska and so on. And from our point of view at BBC Monitoring, we've seen on Russian TV that the Kremlin propagandists look eyeing a Russia friendly peace deal have kind of reined in the criticism of the US.

4:54And at the same time, we've noticed an uptick in criticism of another Western partner, and that is the United Kingdom. I should say that criticism of the UK on Russian TV in itself isn't new. The UK's strong support for Ukraine has definitely not gone unnoticed in Russia. former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He's a familiar face on Russian TV. He's still very much portrayed as this warmonger.

5:22This person who is responsible for derailing peace talks early in the war in 2022.

5:33But ever since Trump's re-election, we've seen a real acceleration in the anti-British rhetoric on Russian TV. It's visible not just in the propaganda shows that we're watching on TV, but also in the official statements. Just in the last year, we've had the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service coming out and saying that Britain is the quote-unquote main instigator of global conflict. Britain has been referred to as the puppet masters of the Ukrainian security services. The UK is supposedly on this multi-year campaign to ensure the strategic defeat of Russia. The UK is accused of all sorts of terrorism and sabotage in Russia as well.

6:17But have Kremlin propagandists or officials actually spelled it out that the UK is now enemy number one, top enemy, whatever they have called it? Yeah, so after noticing this uptick in anti-British rhetoric, what we did at BBC Monitoring's Russia team, we actually ran the data. So we took the output of four of Russia's top political propaganda talk show programmes. You know, this is a very familiar format on Russian TV, where you have a pro-Kremlin host with a lot of kind of Kremlin aligned pundits, and they're like debating the day's news. And so we analysed the output of all of these shows. And we found that not only had mentions of the UK jumped significantly in the start of the war, they jumped significantly again after Donald Trump's re-election.

7:00So we can see a kind of shift perhaps in the narrative, a shift in the criticism towards the UK. UK prime ministers are mentioned on these propaganda talk show programmes actually all of the time. I mentioned Boris Johnson, but Keir Starmer as well. He's presented to Russian viewers very much as this person who's kind of trying to disrupt a dialogue between Moscow and Washington to end the war. UK prime ministers, we found interestingly, are actually mentioned far more on these programs than Russia's own prime minister, Mikhail Mushustin. And so there is a real sense that the UK is being kind of recast as this public enemy in Russian media.

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8:58So the Russian media machine needs an external enemy. It needs it for public consumption, for cohesion of the system in Russia. And so as the Kremlin cuts back in criticising the US, it seems like the UK is emerging as public enemy number one. And how is the UK portrait in Moscow to justify the status as enemy number one? What is the threat the UK poses? So the basic image of the UK, which is being presented on Russian TV, is this command centre of the war against Russia being waged in Ukraine.

9:36There's a strong civilizational aspect to the framing. So the UK is really presented as this epitome of this decaying Western liberal civilization, which is different to the Russian civilization, which is, you know, presented as the protector of traditional conservative values, etc. Whilst the US is, of course, a large military power, and is very much presented as Russia's equal, albeit opponent, the UK is, of course, much smaller, the UK military is much smaller. And so the threat of the UK, as presented in Russian media, is one really of a kind of a country which can disrupt, which can manipulate.

10:18It's this kind of somewhat sinister and underhand actor.

10:29And we see this in the language. Just in the last year or so since Trump's re-election, we're seeing the phrase Kavarni Albion coming up on Russian media quite a lot. That basically translates to perfidious Albion. Albion being this kind of historic term for the British Isles. And perfidious Albion is a phrase that actually first emerged during the Napoleonic Wars in France. But as you say, the UK military is small, yet it's presented as having this outsized power, power to manipulate. Yeah, and this is one of the really interesting findings in our research. The references to UK military capacity on Russian TV are actually quite small.

11:09The UK military isn't actually mentioned much at all, but the UK intelligence services, so MI6, GCHQ and everything else, they're mentioned all of the time on Russian TV. Watching some of these programmes, you could actually have the impression that the MI6 is behind basically all of Russia's problems. So just to list the operations that Russia have officially said in statements that the UK intelligence services are responsible for. There was Operation Spiderweb in 2025. That was a big secret Ukrainian drone operation to take out some high-value Russian military targets deep inside Russian territory.

11:49UK intelligence have been blamed for the Nord Stream pipeline explosion. That was a big gas pipeline carrying Russian gas to Europe. So that's one half of the narrative, that the UK is this nefarious actor. While issuing nuclear threats themselves, the Russians accused Britain and France of intention to provide nuclear weapons to Ukraine, something both countries deny. Oh, it's totally absurd. Of course, totally absurd. And we even did not even bother to answer to that. It's a totally irresponsible provocation. Britain has dismissed Russian claims that it plans to supply Ukraine with a nuclear weapon.

12:36The denial follows allegations. The Russian media actually reports quite a lot on UK domestic politics. There's a program on SIA1. It's called Britain with Alexander Khabarov.

12:51And he's the London correspondent for this big state channel, Russia One. And he's focused on elements of political discord that are familiar to us here in the UK. You know, conversations and debate around the cost of living, around migration. They love talking about political and royal scandals. Also, Britain's colonial history. So on Russian TV and in Russia's official statements, they present the UK as this country suffering from a kind of post-imperial rigor mortis, as it were.

13:22that the country has not overcome the loss of its empire. So those two narratives, it seems to me that they're quite contradictory. So how can they coexist? You know, the idea that this is an imperial power in decline, a relic, and at the same time, it's so powerful, it can be the main disruptor in the world. Exactly. The Russian media is almost overstating Britain's strategic capability, giving credit to Britain for a lot more than it's actually doing in practice. We know that Britain, whilst being a big supporter of Ukraine, it doesn't contribute the same amount as the US has done historically.

13:56It doesn't contribute the same amount to Ukraine as Germany, for example. But I would say that these kind of contradictions, they don't really matter for the Kremlin media machine. The goal of the propaganda is very much to simplify a complex world. The regime needs an external enemy to define itself against. You are listening to The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring. Can you give us a taste of some of the language that officials and propagandists are using that would leave us in no doubt where the UK stands? For sure. So probably the most famous piece of anti-British rhetoric on Russian TV was in 2022, just a few months into the war, when Dmitry Kiselyov, he's one of the big state propagandists, addressing Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister, very directly.

14:43He warned that the explosion of a Russian thermonuclear torpedo off the coast of Britain will raise this giant radioactive wave of up to 500 metres and then sink the UK and turn whatever's left of it into a radioactive desert.

15:07We had Vladimir Salavyev, another big popular propagandist. He recently repeated the same threat about sinking the UK and he actually joked that Russian ships should be careful not to scratch their hulls on Big Ben after the Russian torpedo sinks the UK.

15:29We've had Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He recently said there's no other country in the world that calls itself great, so it should be just Britain. We've had Bortnikov. He's the director of the Domestic Intelligence Services, the FSB. He's called the British the puppet masters of the Ukrainian special services.

15:53Salav Yov again recently, he was almost lamenting that Russia had not destroyed London or Birmingham. And in one other recent tirade that hit quite close to home for those of us that work at the BBC, he criticised the BBC's Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg.

16:14He said, we haven't kicked out that goddamn BBC with that Steven Rottenberg. He walks around looking like a defecating squirrel. He's a conscious enemy of our country. But I'd say probably my favourite piece of anti-British rhetoric came from Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, stepped in for Vladimir Putin for a few years, and a prolific social media user. He wrote recently, Britain was, is, and always will be our eternal enemy, at least until the insolent, unpleasantly damp island sinks into the sea, swallowed by a wave created by Russia's latest weapon system. And he signed the post off saying, let it be, as the Beatles sang.

16:56I confirm it is very damp. So not a fan of Britain, but a fan of British music, at least there's something. You hinted that this animosity towards the UK is not new. And there's a long history going back, what, 200 years? Exactly. So the emergence of the UK as Russia's principal foe, at least in Russian media, is not new because it really represents a return to the past. There's an Anglo-Russian rivalry which has existed for centuries. And this is probably best exemplified by a phrase we've been seeing a lot on Russian TV recently. It's a very historically loaded phrase that's familiar to any Russian, but probably not to many Brits.

17:37It's anglicanka gadget. Now, anglicanka gadget translates roughly to the English woman is doing the dirty. So gadit in Russian, the verb has two meanings. On the one hand, it can mean to defecate or to excrete. But more figuratively, it conveys this idea of kind of spoiling and disrupting. And so the phrase basically means that Britain is scheming against Russia. It's widely believed that the phrase originated in the Crimean War. So that was a conflict between Victorian Britain and the Tsarist Empire in the 1850s. The phrase re-emerged in the 19th century during the Great Game. That was a conflict between, again, Victorian Britain and the Russian Empire, who kind of vied for influence in Central Asia and Persia.

18:23And then it was noticed again in Russian historical documents in the 1920s, when the British state was assisting white Russians in their fight against the new Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War.

18:42And ever since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, and especially since Trump's re-election, we've seen this phrase, Anglicanka Gadget, really reappear in Russian political lexicon.

18:59And our data analysis at BBC Monitoring, we tracked the output of political talk shows, of newspapers in Russia, and Telegram channels. That's Russia's biggest and most popular messaging app. And we can see a real increase in the use of this moniker. You talk about the animosity and a long history, but at the same time, there has been a period where attitudes were much softer. Wave of Anglophilia in the 90s, and then London was called Londongrad or Moscow on Thames. As long as Anglophobia has existed in Russia, so have signs of Anglophilia. Whilst there were periods of tension, like there are now during the Cold War, during the Crimean War, the Russian Civil War.

19:42There were, of course, periods of great collaboration, like in the First World War, in the Second World War, even in the Napoleonic Wars, when the British Empire and the Russian Empire were allies at certain periods. We shouldn't forget, of course, that the Russian and British royal families, they were closely related. Queen Victoria's granddaughter was married to Tsar Nicholas II. Even long before then, Peter the Great, this modernising Tsar who built St. Petersburg, he was known to be a great Anglophile. Tales of Peter the Great's travels to London in 1698, they're legendary. And if you're interested in Russian history, there are these amazing tales of Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia, cavorting in disguise in London pubs and taverns.

20:24He did an apprenticeship at the dockyards in Deptford. And after Peter the Great returned to Russia in the 1690s, there was this great period of Anglophilia, which basically overtook Russian high society in intellectual circles. And as you mentioned, the most recent example was probably in the early 1990s, when there was this influx of new rich Russians into London, the kind of London grad, as they called it, Moscow on Thames, where these new gilded Russian elites would go around the Mayfair boutiques, they would send their children to English private schools, there was lots of work for London lawyers and real estate agents and so on.

21:02And the climax of that whole trend was probably when Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003. There was even a television show on Russian TV as recently as 2015 called London Grad.

21:21And it's this comedic show basically depicting the lives of rich Russians living in London. There was, of course, Putin's visit to London in 2003, where Putin was invited to Buckingham Palace. And there's footage of him online kind of clinking glasses with Queen Elizabeth. And talking about the Russian-British friendship. It's one of the few examples where we've actually seen Putin talking in English. Before I proceed to the formal part, it is clear for everyone that in spite of the differences, today we need to act jointly. It seems like a very distant reality from where we are at the moment.

22:03Indeed, fast forward to 2026 and it is where we are with UK kind of overtaking the US as top enemy. I understand the logic of that, but it makes you wonder, OK, there are other countries in Western Europe. Why not France or Germany? Yeah, it's a very good point. And I should say that Germany and France are also criticised a hell of a lot on Russian TV nowadays. Emmanuel Macron's personal life is a very popular topic among Russian media presenters. And kind of the UK, France and Germany, they're often lumped together and referred to with terms like the Anglo-Europeans Europeans or the European party of war.