Propaganda and Britain’s Long War on Russia

On 15 December 2025 Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, Chief of the Defence Staff and the most senior officer in the British armed forces, addressed the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. He told his audience that Russia’s hard power “is growing quickly,” and that Britain’s “sons and daughters” would all have a part to play: “To build. To serve. And if necessary, to fight.” He warned that “more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means” [1]. Knighton’s speech completed a sequence of official warnings. In June 2025 Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to “restore Britain’s war-fighting readiness as the central purpose of our armed forces” [2], and in February 2026 the Defence Secretary John Healey announced the doubling of British troops in Arctic Norway on the grounds that “Russia poses the greatest threat to Arctic and High North security that we have seen since the Cold War” [3]. In each case the speaker presents Russia as the aggressor and Britain as the reluctant defender of a threatened order.

Harold Lasswell showed in his 1927 study of First World War propaganda that the first task of the war propagandist is to fix the guilt for the war on the enemy [4], a task that requires the public to forget the past. The record of past relations between Britain and Russia clearly shows, from the Crimean war onwards, that Britain not Russia has been the lead aggressor in military engagements between the two countries. In the past, as in the present, Britain is on the offensive: its intelligence services worked closely with the US to set up the 2014 ‘Maidan Coup’, to unseat a democratically elected President who wanted peace with Russia. Britain then helped to arm and train the Ukrainian army in the war that the Western approved replacement Presidents pursued against the Russian speaking provinces of eastern Ukraine in the seven years prior to the Russian invasion. Britain also opposed the peace talks of 2022 in Istanbul, and Britain is now building in factories on its own soil the drones that strike Moscow. Britain has also constructed since 2018 a legal and propagandistic apparatus to police the dissent of its own citizens concerning the war, and to promote the ‘Russia’ threat to British audiences.

A Long Enmity

English relations with Russia began in 1553, when Richard Chancellor reached the court of Ivan IV in Moscow. Ivan pressed Elizabeth I from 1567 for a military alliance, and Elizabeth offered trade instead, setting the terms of a relationship in which London wanted Russia’s hemp and timber but not an equal ally [5, 6]. Three centuries later, in 1854 Lord Palmerston circulated a plan to strip Russia of Finland, the Baltic provinces, Poland, the Crimea and the Caucasus, and the Crimean War that followed cost at least 800,000 lives [7]. Subsequent though unfounded fears of a Russian advance on India drove the rivalry in Central Asia that the British called the Great Game [8]. After the Bolshevik revolution British troops landed at Murmansk and Archangel in 1918, the MI6 agent Sidney Reilly plotted with the diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart to arrest Lenin, and in 1919 the Royal Air Force dropped an arsenic-based gas, the ‘M Device’, on villages along the Dvina river on Winston Churchill’s orders [9, 10, 11]. Britain withdrew its troops from North Russia in 1919. But hostilities did not end. Within a fortnight of the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, a war in which the Soviet Union fought alongside Britain and the other Allies against Germany and lost some 27 million dead, Churchill’s planners drafted Operation Unthinkable, a plan “to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire” [12]. In 1948 the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin created the Information Research Department, which for three decades fed unattributed anti-Soviet material to journalists, the BBC and publishers [13, 14]. Each generation of British propagandists has built on the work of the last.

The Grand Chessboard

The strategic rationale for the present war however came from Washington DC not London. In The Grand Chessboard (1997) Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser, argued that American primacy depended on preventing any power from dominating Eurasia: “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.” He identified Ukraine as the decisive “geopolitical pivot” on the Eurasian board, and wrote that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire” [15]. Brzezinski had already shown how a pivot state could be used against Moscow. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998 he recalled that “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” six months before Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, and that on the day of the invasion he wrote to Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” [16].

Conor Tobin has shown from the archives that Brzezinski overstated after the event that he had planned to lure Moscow into invading Afghanistan [17]. But the boast named a strategy – to defeat the USSR by inveigling it into a foreign war – and Afghans have lived with its consequences for almost half a century, through Soviet occupation, civil war among the mujahideen factions the West had armed, Taliban rule, and twenty years of American and British occupation that ended with the evacuation of Kabul in August 2021.

In 2019 the RAND Corporation, in a study for the United States Army led by James Dobbins, formerly the American special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, assessed “cost-imposing options” against Russia and concluded that arming Ukraine “would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability,” provided the aid was calibrated to raise Russia’s costs “without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages” [18].

The Maidan Coup and Minsk

The Brzezinski strategy of Russian provocation in Afghanistan succeeded in the sense that the war in Afghanistan precipitated the end of the Soviet Union. But, not satisfied with the dismemberment of the USSR, the US and UK returned to the strategy of a proxy war to humble Russia in the 1990s, and this time it was the people of Ukraine who were to be sacrificed. The lead on the ground agent of the offering up of Ukraine for this tragic fate was the US career diplomat, and former American ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland. In 2013 Nuland became Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs [19]. In December 2013, while protesters occupied Kyiv’s Independence Square, the Maidan, against President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union, Nuland told the US-Ukraine Foundation that the United States had “invested over $5 billion” in a “secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.” The State Department later explained that the figure covered two decades of aid since 1991, and the protests drew hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians with grievances of their own [20]. But a telephone call between Nuland and the American ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, recorded and leaked in early February 2014, shows how far Washington regarded the outcome as its business. Weighing the opposition leaders for office, Nuland said: “I think ‘Yats’ is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience” [21]. Yanukovych fled Kyiv on 22 February, and on 27 February the parliament appointed Arseniy Yatsenyuk prime minister. Nuland later claimed she had worked to de-escalate the crisis [19]. But having overseen the orchestratation of a coup, and selected a prime minister even before the elected government had fallen, Nuland laid the groundwork for a proxy war in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died in combat, and which caused millions of Ukrainains to flee the country.

The war that followed the Maidan Coup in the Donbas fell hardest on its Russian-speaking civilians. In July 2014 Human Rights Watch investigated four Grad rocket attacks on Donetsk and the village of Maryinka that killed at least 16 civilians, and concluded that Ukrainian government forces and pro-government militias had fired them; residents described running to their basements as the rockets fell [22]. The United Nations human rights monitoring mission recorded 3,106 conflict-related civilian deaths between April 2014 and December 2021, and in each year from 2019 to 2021 recorded several times as many civilian casualties from hostilities in the separatist-held territories as on the government side [23]. In 2019 the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe found that Ukraine’s new state language law treated pupils whose native language was Russian less favourably than those whose native language was an EU language, without “objective and reasonable justification” [24].

The Minsk agreements of September 2014 and February 2015, brokered by France and Germany, were meant to end the war through a ceasefire, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, and special self-governing status for the Donbas within Ukraine. Kyiv never enacted any element of the Minsk agreements and continued shelling towns and cities in the Donbas. In December 2022 the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the agreement’s guarantors, told Die Zeit that “the 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” time which, as she acknowledged, Ukraine used to strengthen its army [25]. British instructors used the same years to train that army. When the Russian government proposed draft treaties to the United States and NATO in December 2021, seeking an undertaking that Ukraine would not join NATO, and that allied forces would not operate in Eastern Europe, Western governments rejected them. On 17 February 2022 monitors of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe recorded 648 ceasefire violations, including 519 explosions, in the Luhansk region of the Donbas alone [26]. A week later Vladimir Putin announced that Russian forces would act to “protect people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kyiv for eight years” [27]. British audiences heard this claim only as Kremlin propaganda. The collapse of Minsk, Merkel’s admission, and the escalation of shelling recorded by the monitors on the eve of the Russian invasion give Moscow’s stated purpose, to end a war on the Russian-speaking republics that Kyiv had fought since 2014, more substance than any British minister has conceded.

Planning for Enmity

A Chatham House paper reveals how British policy was framed on the eve of the Russian invasion. Published on 27 January 2022 under the title A New Russia Policy for Post-Brexit Britain, its authors admitted that “the likelihood of a Russian military attack on the UK is very low,” and that “the main dangers are assassinations, espionage, cyber-enabled attacks on critical national infrastructure, exposure to corruption and disruptive information warfare.” Nonetheless they advised that “UK decision-makers should plan on the assumption that bilateral relations will remain largely adversarial for the foreseeable future,” praised the National Cyber Force for strengthening Britain’s “offensive and defensive cyber assets,” and cited “the aftermath of the 2018 Salisbury attack” as a model of British “lobbying and public diplomacy campaigns” [28]. A threat that Britain’s own Russia specialists rated “very low” a month before the invasion has since become, in Knighton’s words, a reason for British families to prepare for sacrifice.

The Turn of 2018

The British state’s preparation for confrontation with Russia gathered pace in 2018. On 4 March the former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, who had spied for MI6 and settled in Salisbury after a spy exchange, collapsed with his daughter Yulia on a bench in the city centre. Within eight days Theresa May told the House of Commons that it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible. On 3 April Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the government’s chemical weapons laboratory at Porton Down, eight miles from Salisbury, told Sky News that his scientists had identified the agent as Novichok but had “not verified the precise source,” contradicting Boris Johnson’s claim that Porton Down had been “absolutely categorical” [29]. By then the government had expelled 23 Russian diplomats, and on 26 and 27 March more than 20 allied governments expelled over 100 more in what Johnson called “the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers ever” [30].

Critics questioned the official account from the start. Within ten days of the poisoning academics of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published a briefing note titled ‘Doubts about “Novichoks” ‘ [31], and the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, pointed out that Pablo Miller, Skripal’s former MI6 handler, who also lived in Salisbury, appeared on a contact list of the Integrity Initiative, the Foreign Office-funded project to counter what it called Russian disinformation, alongside Duncan Allan, then the Foreign Office’s lead analyst on Russia [32]. In December 2025 the public inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess, a mother of three who died in July 2018 after spraying herself from a discarded perfume bottle that contained the nerve agent, concluded under its chair Lord Hughes that Vladimir Putin had “authorised the mission” and bore “moral responsibility” for her death [33]. Whoever organised the Salisbury incident, the British government used it within weeks to assemble an international diplomatic front against Moscow, and Dawn Sturgess, living in a Salisbury homeless hostel, paid with her life for an intelligence operation in which she had no part.

The same year saw the creation of the legal and institutional apparatus for the propaganda war. In May 2018 Parliament passed the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act, which gave ministers power to impose sanctions outside the European Union framework, and the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations of 2019 made under it allowed ministers to freeze the assets of anyone judged to be involved in actions “destabilising Ukraine” [34]. The Foreign Office raised its funding of the anti-Russian Integrity Initiative from £296,500 in 2017–18 to a budget of almost £2 million for 2018–19. Documents leaked in November 2018 showed that the project had promoted news articles attacking the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, for which its founder Chris Donnelly later apologised [35]. Between 2017 and 2019 the Foreign Office also commissioned media programmes, for which Reuters and the BBC bid, designed to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours” [36]. And in 2019 the government created a Counter Disinformation Unit inside the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Reporting by Big Brother Watch in 2023 revealed that the unit had logged the public comments of British citizens, among them the Oxford epidemiologist Carl Heneghan and the Conservative MP David Davis, during the Covid19 pandemic [37].

Policing the Narrative

The sanction powers created in 2018 fell on a British citizen in July 2022. Graham Phillips, a freelance video journalist who had reported from the Donbas since 2014, first as a stringer for Russian state television and then on his own YouTube channel, which attracted more than 112 million views, had filmed Kyiv regime shelling, and sniper fire, in Russian-speaking towns and interviewed residents. The Foreign Office accused him of producing content that “supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilise Ukraine” [38]. The designation froze his bank account, and PayPal and Patreon closed his accounts, so that, in the words of the court that later heard his challenge, “his entire income stream was eliminated” [39]. The government’s case rested in part on his April 2022 interview with Aiden Aslin, a British volunteer captured at Mariupol, whom he filmed in handcuffs; the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson said it could violate the Geneva Conventions’ protection of prisoners of war [38].

In January 2024 Mr Justice Johnson upheld the designation as a proportionate interference with his freedom of expression [39]. Whatever view one takes of the Aslin interview, a British minister can now remove the livelihood of a British journalist, without charge or trial, for reporting that contradicts government policy on a foreign war. Phillips was one case in a widening legal net. In March 2022 the broadcasting regulator Ofcom revoked the licence of the Russian channel RT [40]. The National Security Act 2023 created an offence of foreign interference, and since March 2025 the Online Safety Act has required online platforms to remove state-sponsored disinformation; in July 2025 the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme came into force [41]. On 17 June 2026 the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood introduced the National Security (State Threats) Bill, which allows ministers to designate organisations engaged in “foreign power threat activity” and makes it an offence to support or benefit from them, aimed at Russia, China and Iran; the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns protested that the government was pushing it through the Commons in a single day [42]. Each measure is presented as a defence against Russian propaganda, and each widens the power of ministers to decide which accounts of the war British citizens may publish, fund or hear.

And the media have supplied the chorus. The former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Patrick Sanders told LBC that war with Russia was a “realistic possibility” by 2030 [43], and headlines of the alleged Russian ‘menace’ now appear in the British press almost daily. Matthew Blackburn’s study of the first year of British media coverage of the war found a pattern of “cheering and jeering” that “essentially avoided serious debate” about the risks of escalation [44]. At time of writing British newspapers carried 250 articles warning of the threat from Russia. None of them explained the extent to which Britain is majorly invested in escalating the war directly on Russia via manufacture and shipment of thousands of drones a month, and engineering and advisory back up on the ground in Ukraine. A public that hears no serious debate about the war is poorly placed to discover that its own government worked with the US to provoke the war, and is working with the Ukrainian regime, and other European powers, to escalate it.

The Offensive

Military preparations ran alongside the information campaign. From February 2015 to 17 February 2022, a week before the Russian invasion, British instructors trained 22,000 Ukrainian soldiers inside Ukraine under Operation Orbital, while the Minsk agreements remained unimplemented, and by June 2026 its successor, Operation Interflex, had trained more than 63,000 on British soil [45, 46]. After the invasion, British policy hardened against any settlement. In November 2023 David Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation at the Istanbul peace talks of March and April 2022, said that Boris Johnson “came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight” [47]. Johnson’s defenders point out that Arakhamia described this as advice and said Ukraine did not trust Russia to honour an agreement [48]. Nonetheless the advice came from the leader of the government that went on to supply the weapons for the fight.

In June 2023 Chatham House published a second report, led by James Nixey, director of its Russia and Eurasia Programme, which dismissed calls for negotiation as “fallacies” and urged that “Western military support to Kyiv should be redoubled before it is too late” [49]. In the same year it was confirmed that British special forces were present on the ground in Ukraine. A leaked Pentagon document of March 2023 put their number at around 50, although the Ministry of Defence said the leaked material showed “a serious level of inaccuracy” which could mean there were many more [50]. In the previous year documents leaked to the journalist Kit Klarenberg described plans by veterans of British military intelligence to train Ukrainian partisans for sabotage in Crimea, identifying the pillars of the Kerch Strait bridge as its “weakest part,” and proposing that it could be attacked with “cruise missiles, specially trained scuba teams, or underwater drones” [51]. In July 2023 Ukraine’s Security Service struck the bridge with Sea Baby naval drones [52]. Navy Lookout, a publication sympathetic to the Royal Navy, records that Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff from 2021 to 2025, “played an important part in encouraging and advising on aspects of the Black Sea battle” [53], and in November 2024 Sir Richard Moore, Chief of MI6, told an audience in Paris: “We cherish our heritage of covert action, which we keep alive today in helping Ukraine resist the Russian invasion” [54].

Factories and Targets

Britain now manufactures the weapons of this war on its own soil. In February 2026 Ukrspecsystems, Ukraine’s largest drone maker, opened a £200 million factory in the town of Mildenhall in Suffolk, close to the United States Air Force bases at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath, together with a second site at Elmsett, to build reconnaissance drones whose output, the company claims, has helped destroy nearly $3 billion of Russian military equipment; the minister Luke Pollard declared at the opening that Britain’s “resolve to support Ukraine is stronger than ever” [55, 56]. From February 2026 British factories also began building Ukraine’s Octopus interceptor drones under licence at a planned rate of 1,000 a month [57]. In June 2026 the Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis pledged 150,000 drones to Ukraine, paid for from the proceeds of immobilised Russian state assets [58], and on the night of 18 August 2026 Ukraine launched 637 drones at Moscow [59].

Moscow’s response was inevitable. In April 2026 the Russian Ministry of Defence published a list of European factories producing drones for Ukraine, including four sites in Britain. And former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote that the list “must be taken literally” as “a list of potential targets for the Russian armed forces” [60]. In August 2026 the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that Russia’s response to Ukrainian strikes with British weapons “could be directed against any British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond” [61]. The Russian threat that Knighton invokes has in this sense been manufactured in the UK. By turning British towns into production centres for a war on Russian territory, the government has made them targets under the laws of war, and it now cites the danger its own policy has created as the reason for war preparedness.

An Empire of Bases

The core claim of UK propaganda concerning the Ukraine war is that Russia, not Britain, is the agressor. But in November 2020 Phil Miller of Declassified UK established that Britain maintains a permanent military presence at 145 sites in 42 countries or territories, the second largest overseas base network in the world after that of the United States [62]. Many form an arc around Russia, from the Royal Navy helicopter base at Bardufoss in Arctic Norway, some 350 miles from the headquarters of Russia’s Northern Fleet, where Healey’s February 2026 announcement doubled British troops to 2,000, to the British-led NATO battlegroup at Tapa in Estonia, new forces committed to Finland in 2025, 17 installations in Cyprus and 16 in Oman [62, 3, 63, 64]. In June 2025 Britain signed a military cooperation plan with Kazakhstan, which shares a border of more than 7,500 kilometres with Russia [65]. A Russian officer looking at this map sees encirclement, while the British public, told daily that Russia menaces Europe, is never shown the map. [66] [67].

Britain on the Offensive

The official account of Britain’s relationship with Russia inverts the truth. Britain is consistently not the victim of Russian aggression but the initiator of conflicts between the two countries. Despite its small size, Britain maintains seven times as many overseas military sites as Russia, many of them close to Russian borders. Britain trained the Ukrainian army in offensive capabilities in Kyiv’s war with the Russian speaking regions of Eastern Ukraine through the years in which the Minsk agreements went unimplemented. Britain advised Kyiv against a peace settlement in 2022. Britain stationed special forces and planners inside the war zone. And Britain now manufactures at home the drones that fly against Moscow. When Russia answers with threats against British factories, ministers and generals cite those threats as proof of the Russian danger and as the reason for further rearmament. And the laws passed since 2018 narrow the space in which any citizen can understand what is really going on, or mobilise to challenge it through democratic channels.

The beneficiaries of the war are not hard to find. BAE Systems, Britain’s largest arms manufacturer, under its chief executive Charles Woodburn, reported record sales of £30.7 billion and a record order backlog of £83.6 billion in February 2026 [68]. The costs fall on Ukrainian conscripts in the trenches of the Donbas and the Russians facing them; on Dawn Sturgess and other casualties of the intelligence war; and possibly on the British “sons and daughters” whom General Knighton wishes to prepare for sacrifice in an unwinnable war designed to humble the largest and most resource-rich nation on earth. Lasswell observed that the war propagandist first fixes the guilt for the war on the enemy [4]. The British state has spent eight years doing so. But the deeper purpose of the propaganda is to conceal that the war it describes as Russian aggression is a proxy war that Britain, along with the United States, spent years provoking. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, is a pawn in a greater game. If Britain cared as much as its government claims for the people of the Ukraine, it would not have joined with the United States in a multi-year, multi-billion dollar intelligence operation to inveigle Russia into the conflict in the first place.

Along with Von der Leyen, Macron and Merz, Starmer, and now Burnham, are the leading European voices on the likelihood of a direct hot war with Russia. Propagandists of all three governments, and of the European Commission, claim this is all about the national integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and the need to defend its borders. Meanwhile foreign migrants cross the borders of Germany, France and the UK, and the military of these three nations are apparently unable to stop them. The supposed purpose of a nation such as Britain having military forces is ‘the defence of the realm’. But far from defending the realm the government oversees a situation in which British maritime borders are undefended from foreign vessels such as inflatables, while committing the declining and increasingly parlous state of Britain’s military forces to the defence of a realm fifteen hundred miles from Britain.

Meanwhile there is only very limited mass political mobilisation against war in Britain, and just two small British political parties on the so called ‘far left’ and ‘far right’ – namely Workers Party of Britain and English Democrats – that stand on a platform of no more war. Stop the War Coalition is the largest cross-party and democratic effort to mobilise against the war but it is not a political party and so democratic choices against the war are extremely limited. In Britain it seems the propagandists are winning. More hopefully the warmongering parties and presidents in France and Germany have seen a total collapse in public support, while anti-war parties and presidential candidates look likely to take over both governments in forthcoming national elections. And Brexit in the end may fatally undermine the ability of Britain to continue to drag Europe into a pointless but incredibly costly war that Europe cannot possibly win and that European citizens strenuously oppose. So perhaps after all Brexit may turn out to be a cloud with a silver lining.

References

1. Richard Knighton, ‘Chief of the Defence Staff Speech, 15 December 2025,’ Royal United Services Institute, London, 15 December 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chief-of-the-defence-staff-speech-15-december-2025
2. ‘UK plans $2bn weapons upgrade as Starmer calls for “war readiness”,’ Al Jazeera, 1 June 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/1/uk-plans-2bn-weapons-upgrade-as-starmer-calls-for-war-readiness
3. Ministry of Defence, ‘UK steps up defence of Arctic and High North from rising Russian threats,’ GOV.UK, 11 February 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-steps-up-defence-of-arctic-and-high-north-from-rising-russian-threats
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    (Featured Image: “Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits Ukraine (55397496775)” by Number 10 is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Cropped by Propaganda In Focus.)