AT WAR WITH RUSSIA (BUT WE DON’T KNOW IT) CHACR COMMENTARY // SEPTEMBER 2025
BY: Emily Ferris, Senior Research Fellow, RUSI
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USSIA’S approach to the UK is filled with contradiction, misunderstanding and both over and underestimation. At once an object of curious fascination, suggestions of Britain’s insidious and all-powerful intelligence capabilities sit alongside simultaneous derision of our political position as an empire with its best days behind it. But nevertheless, ‘perfidious Albion’ holds an important place in Russian history and modern understandings. Russia’s views about the UK as a political and economic entity can be separated from the Kremlin’s modern perspective of our armed forces, intelligence agencies and understanding of the UK as a naval power.
“THE UK HAS BEEN GIVEN AN OUTSIZED ROLE AS MOSCOW’S ENEMY, VIEWED AS WORKING IN TANDEM WITH THE UKRAINIAN SECURITY SERVICES TO DISRUPT RUSSIA’S POLITICAL GOALS AND EVEN TO UNDERMINE RUSSIA FROM WITHIN BY FOMENTING REGIME CHANGE.” Officially, the UK is given scant mention in Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept, an important document that offers a sense of Russia’s broad policy attitudes (but not its implementation), published in 2023 amid the war. Here, Britain is referred to dismissively as part of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, a term popularised by the Russian defence community, which frames the UK as a footnote in its relationship with the otherwise more significant United States, and as an empire in decline.
Russia’s foreign policy is often rife with contradiction, but this confusion allows Russia a degree of flexibility in implementation. The Concept is not set in stone, and parts of British policy – such as sanctions legislation – are variously held up as an example of the UK as a hostile entity seeking regime change in Moscow. But aspects of the UK, such as respect for its education system, perceptions of a vestigial class system that seems to still appeal to Russia, and an attractive (and poorly regulated) financial and real estate sector,
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can sit comfortably alongside this Russian narrative of the UK, with little conflict. In practical terms, Russia certainly appears to expend a great deal of its own intelligence resources, cyber capacity and economic tools to variously disrupt or penetrate British companies, individuals of interest or its critical national infrastructure. For its military and political support of Ukraine and role as a convening power of the Coalition of the Willing, the UK has been given an outsized role as Moscow’s enemy, viewed as working in tandem with the Ukrainian security services to disrupt Russia’s political goals and even to undermine Russia from within by fomenting regime change. For example, in June 2025