Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why the Kremlin sees Britain as the ultimate bogeyman

Credit: Getty images

Perfidious Albion is at it again. The Kremlin’s increasingly unhinged obsession with seeing a British hand behind its various upsets has now manifested itself in a claim that the UK is behind the establishment of a death squad operating in Africa.

The claim, trumpeted across Russia’s state-run media, is that MI6 is behind a ‘punitive saboteur unit consisting of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis’ being trained for operations in Africa. According to an unnamed ‘military-diplomatic source,’ London requested in July that the Ukrainian government help it recruit this force.

Russians are at once warmly Anglophile and deeply Anglophobe, a paradoxical relationship unlike any other

In response, the Ukrainian Security Service and Main Intelligence Directorate worked with MI6 and the SAS to pick at least a hundred veterans ‘with combat experience on the “eastern front”’ to be commanded by a certain ‘Lt. Colonel V. Praschyuk.’ According to the Russians, this 43-year-old action man has been a parliamentarian, a special forces commander, a marine and even a participant in a joint operation by British and Ukrainian intelligence in Zimbabwe of all places.

Mark Galeotti
Written by
Mark Galeotti

Mark Galeotti heads the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and is honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the author of some 30 books on Russia. His latest, Forged in War: a military history of Russia from its beginnings to today, is out now.

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