North-Eastern European states that were once occupied by the Soviet Union are controlled as pawns by British puppet-masters who don’t care for them, Moscow claims.
Moscow has made the latest claims in a long line of what may amount to conspiracy theories that the United Kingdom remains “Perfidious Albion”, secretly manipulating world affairs for its own ends. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in his first public comments in over a week that Western-Europe — “spearheaded by the British” — are using Eastern European states to provoke Russia into war.
Describing Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as “fledgling Europeans” — all three nations were invaded and annexed in 1940 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 — Russian state media notes he claimed they were simply being used with disdain as “pawns” for British power games.
He is reported to have said: “All these smaller countries… greatly overestimate their importance to Western Europeans, to the EU old-timers. And the few in Europe who still have a shred of common sense and indeed care about the continent’s security, and there are fewer and fewer of those, they understand perfectly well which provocative role was given to these Baltic countries, spearheaded by the British.”
“This is well known”, he added.
Earlier this year, Russia revived Victorian-era anti-British tropes in service of these claims, calling the UK “Perfidious Albion” and claiming it was uniquely Britain that was working to drag the world into war. The UK was trying to sabotage peace talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin because any deal would undermine the ultimate British foreign policy goal, they said, of “containing” Russia.
This narrative leans into other Russian lines over the course of the Ukraine war that NATO is an “Anglo-Saxon” alliance of the U.S. and UK, with the remaining partners unwittingly duped into taking part and into doing the fighting while the “treacherous” British sit out the coming war “on their island”.
Failings of Russian security and intelligence have repeatedly been laid at the door of the British. In 2023, Putin blamed British spies for a Ukrainian special forces team allegedly caught trying to attack a Russian nuclear facility, again stating London was trying to provoke atomic war for its own ends. Earlier this year, Sergei Lavrov had again pointed the finger of blame, stating he had “100 per cent certainty” that sabotage missions against Russia’s internal infrastructure were the work of the British.
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