The Kremlin Views the UK's SDR as a Declaration of War

It has been an eventful few weeks for Russia. An unprecedented and innovative Ukrainian drone attack targeting airfields deep inside Russia; more negotiations with the Americans in Istanbul; the detonation of the annexed Crimea Bridge; its involvement in the Israel-Iran war, and the publication of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), calling Russia an ‘immediate and pressing threat’ to British national security. Although some of these are more important than others in Moscow’s eyes, they raise questions about Russia’s perceptions of security matters, and in particular how they interpret the threat from Europe.

If Russia indeed poses one of the most significant threats to British national security, then it is worth trying to get under the skin of how the Russians see us.

Immediate Reactions

Initially, the SDR’s publication was met with a mixture of derision and caution in Russia. Several members of Russia’s upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, maintained dismissively that the UK is not capable of being part of the ‘geopolitical troika’ – referring to the US, Russia and China, countries that are considered to have greater international and military clout – commentators were variously suggesting that Russia has been made an outsize enemy as a ruse to justify UK military spending or to detract from domestic concerns, and that without the US’s support, the UK’s military footprint is small. The State Duma (lower house of parliament) was similarly dismissive and played down the prospect of preparation for future war with Russia.

But this was not uniform. Other commentators in Kremlin-affiliated media went further, maintaining that the UK has expansionist designs on the Black Sea, aiming to expand its own sphere of influence – something that Russia itself does. Indeed, some dissenting voices in Russia suggested Moscow take seriously the UK’s announcement, as it takes a position that other countries such as France and Germany are increasingly adopting against Russia. Perhaps most concerningly, the headline takeaway in Moscow appears to be that the UK is ‘secretly’ planning for a future direct military conflict with Russia.

More so than words, Russia’s actions towards the UK following the SDR were revealing. First, Russia swiftly designated the British Council as an ‘undesirable organisation’, effectively halting all their educational activities in Russia. Although the Council has largely been barred from operating since the war began, the symbolic designation carried with it the claim that the Council has been a foil for British intelligence in Russia. Indeed, it gave significant airtime to the Council’s widespread intelligence activities, including allegations of attempting to foment unrest among the Baltic states against Russia.

Second, a few days later, the SVR (foreign service) on 5 June published a lengthy treatise on its website on the UK’s policy towards Georgia – mostly on the UK’s involvement with the opposition, NGOs and activism – and its alleged subversive activities. The SVR’s media page is not especially /span>prolific and tends to reprint speeches, occasional war updates or criticisms of notable western officials. It is therefore less than coincidental that the SVR has chosen to publish its criticism of the UK at this time.

But all of these various reactions to the SDR highlight in some way the paradoxical and highly contradictory nature of Moscow’s relationship with London.

How Do They See Us?

Russia has a long and varied history with the UK, marred most obviously in recent years by Russia’s various wars and intelligence operations on British soil. Prior to Trump’s resumption of office, Russia’s narratives of the UK could be divided into three broad and sometimes contradictory strokes.

The first is Russia’s rather dismissive branding of ‘perfidious Albion’ as an outmoded puppet of the US, and a country with limited international heft. Russia’s understanding of the way it sees the world is most clearly expressed in its Foreign Policy Concept, published in 2023 amid the war. There, it refers to the UK as part of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world – a purposeful reference to an extinct civilisation which tallies with Russian ideas of the decline of the West (and the concomitant rising of Russia’s own star).

The UK is mentioned in a somewhat throwaway paragraph entitled ‘the US and other Anglo-Saxon states’, drawing a power distinction between Washington, and those who are seen as in its pockets. Indeed, there is an entire section dedicated to Russia’s rumination of its relationship with the US, despite it’s so called ‘anti-Russian policy’ and a mere sentence referring to other ‘Anglo Saxon’ countries. This definition is unclear – it seems to be rather liberally used to refer to some European countries as well – but the sentiment is.

If Russia sees the world in terms of who has power and who does not, it was evident that Russia does not consider the UK to be on a par with itself, China or the US –the ‘geopolitical troika’ referred to above.

This narrative runs alongside but not necessarily counter to Russia’s second narrative, of the UK as a provider of occasionally desirable assets. Russia’s practical interests in the UK’s real estate sector, capitalisation on illicit flows through the UK’s banking system; admiration of the British schooling system, and access to gold standard institutions such as British contract law are well established. The UK’s perceived international relevance does not negate Russia’s patronage of certain institutions that can further some of Russia’s interests abroad.

Then there is the third and similarly contradictory strategy, which is that while maintaining the UK’s supreme irrelevance, Russia appears to invest some resources in its intelligence penetration of the UK, as well as showcasing Russia’s aerial and naval capabilities close to British waters and airspace with relative frequency.

A corollary of this is that Russia appears to expend a fair amount of media resources into criticising the UK’s ‘Russophobic’ stance and framing it as a country focused on undermining Russia and its development. According to this narrative, the UK occupies a space in an international system designed to keep Russia out of what Moscow perceives to be its rightful domain in international affairs. This perception likely increases the UK’s attractiveness as an intelligence target, as well as our relationship with the US.

Testing Russian Narratives

But if the above narrative strings were the basis of Russia’s understanding of the UK, since the war and Trump and Starmer’s respective terms of office, they have become harder for Russia to sustain, and so they have perceptibly shifted.

First, President Trump’s perceived pullback from NATO, admonishment of the European states over their spending, and apparent echoing of some of Russia’s security concerns, as well as his willingness to entertain the Russian position, have all forced Moscow to draw much more of a distinction between US and UK foreign policies.

In this vein, much of the media reaction to the SDR has focused on Moscow’s perception of the UK as luring the US into an open war with Russia. This is not just confined to the media. Political heavyweights such as Nikolai Patrushev, formerly head of the Security Council and now a presidential aide and head of the Maritime Board, which is involved with maritime security and Arctic development, have in recent months made public distinctions between the US and what they refer to as the ‘European wing of NATO’, led by London. A growing narrative is instead that London is seeking to subvert the nascent dialogue between Moscow and Washington, and it is Trump who is walking back from an outright war with Russia.

Indeed, the head of the SVR in March 2025 issued an unusually focused and charged statement about the UK, accusing London of undermining Trump’s negotiating stance with Russia; highlighting the UK’s weakness without the US, and going as far as to refer to the UK as the main instigator of global conflict.

Second, the UK’s spearheading of the Coalition of the Willing appears to have somewhat wrongfooted the Russians. Consecutive Conservative governments and their stance on Russia were a known entity for Moscow, but Starmer’s continuation of military aid to Ukraine, boosting of UK defence spending and careful rhetoric around Trump (that does not go as far as criticising US negotiations with the Russians), are all surprising elements for Russia’s understanding of how a Labour government operates.

Starmer’s role in bringing together European countries against Russia prompted some Russian officials to describe the UK as the ‘locomotive that pulls the rest of the [countries] with it’. All of this is a stark departure from the UK’s perceived international irrelevance and runs directly counter to Russia’s view that the UK does not have an independent foreign policy from the US. This has unseated Russia’s narrative of a UK that has little international clout, with deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko maintaining the UK, France and Germany are responsible for the slowing down of peace negotiations on the war.

Third, Russia’s domestic security scene has changed, and with it, Russia’s perception of what constitutes an ‘enemy’. Throughout 2024, a series of IS-affiliated terrorist attacks have occurred within Russia since the war began, either due to a lack of preventative resources, or because the security services have prioritising targeting Russia’s political opposition, instead of addressing the terrorist threat. The most unusual element is not the domestic intelligence failures, but the Russian branding of enemies such as the UK as behind some of its most serious attacks.

In the wake of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in March 2024, where almost 150 people were killed by gunmen professing allegiance to IS, Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB, publicly maintained that while the perpetrators may have been linked to IS, the true masterminds behind the attack were the UK, the US and Ukraine. In reality, this did not have any material impact on the FSB’s investigation of the true perpetrators, and resources were not expunged on identifying any serious link to the UK. But the narrative of an outsize threat to Russia, posed by an apparently irrelevant and powerless political entity, that nevertheless had the resources and interests in destabilising the country, is difficult to square with official understandings of where the UK sits in Russia’s power ranking.

The SVR has a journal called Razvedchik (intelligence officer) and while its readership might be small, the articles they choose to run with are revealing. In one of its most recent publications, Razvedchik released ‘declassified’ intelligence documents alleging the British foreign service had attempted in 2024, in conjunction with the US, to attack Russian bases in Syria, with the aim of destabilising the region more broadly. While this is unlikely to be credible, it is further evidence of a contradictory framing of the UK as both an international irrelevance, but also the driving force behind the destabilisation of countries in which Russia has interests.

For information purposes, these mutually exclusive narratives can all be folded into a broader picture of what constitutes Russia’s understanding of the UK, which can be multifaceted and inconsistent. But they also point to a more concerning lack of insight on Moscow’s part, and perhaps a lack of clarity on the UK’s part – about what the UK’s intentions are towards countries Russia has a particular focus on; about how foreign policymaking works in the West, and why the UK has become a euphemistic bogeyman, along with the rest of the ‘collective West’, to account for Russia’s own failings.

Most pressingly, this collection of views suggests changes of leadership will not be sufficient to move the dial on Moscow’s relations with London.

© RUSI, 2025.

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