In August, tensions between London and Moscow escalated sharply over Britain's military backing for Ukraine. Kyiv's successful long-range strikes deep into Russian territory, aided by UK-supplied drones, and Britain's pledge to share blueprints for long-range missile production, prompted the Kremlin to accuse the UK of deliberately fanning the conflict.
Russia's embassy in London warned that the deeper Britain's involvement, "the higher price it will pay," and accused the UK government of seeking "to contain Russia and inflict maximum damage on it by proxy." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described Britain as "methodically and regularly" fueling war and "hatching schemes" to undermine peace. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova went further, suggesting that British military targets could now be legitimate targets because of Ukrainian strikes using British weapons.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham responded by reaffirming London's stance, saying the UK would "support Ukraine 100%." But Moscow's narrative casts Britain not merely as one of Ukraine's principal backers, but as a shadowy puppeteer within an anti-Russian coalition, pulling strings from behind the scenes.
This portrayal of outsized British influence is strikingly reminiscent of Soviet thinking exactly a century ago. In the mid-1920s, the Soviet leadership leveled similar accusations against Britain regarding another country on its western border: Poland.
Poland and Soviet Russia had fought a bitter war in 1919–20, ending in a humiliating Soviet defeat. Soviet hostility toward Poland was understandable, as was distrust of Britain, which had intervened in the Russian Civil War on the side of the anti-Bolshevik White Armies. But by the mid-1920s, these real grievances had morphed into a conspiratorial worldview. Britain, still the world's dominant imperial power, increasingly appeared in Soviet thinking as the hidden hand behind independent threats to the USSR.
Poland thus occupied a position remarkably similar to that assigned to Ukraine in Russian rhetoric today. Soviet officials struggled to imagine Poland acting autonomously. From the early 1920s, Soviet military intelligence and the secret police reported that Britain was actively organizing an anti-Soviet bloc, including Poland and other border states, that could be pushed into war against the fledgling Soviet Union.
These suspicions intensified in May 1926, when Józef Piłsudski, the nationalist leader who had defeated the Red Army in 1920, seized power in a coup. Senior Soviet officials interpreted Piłsudski's move as inspired by Britain. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of the OGPU secret police, was convinced the coup was "entirely supported by England" and warned Josef Stalin that Poland intended to seize Ukraine and Belarus. Another intelligence report described Piłsudski as Britain's "guard dog" in Eastern Europe.
Reports from better-informed diplomats, such as Soviet representative in Warsaw Pyotr Voikov and Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, contradicted this narrative but were ignored. When Litvinov complained about the Soviet tendency to see "the malevolent hand of the British government everywhere," Stalin disagreed, insisting on an international conspiracy that would make another war inevitable.
The 'hand of England'
Fears that Britain would manipulate Poland into war peaked in June 1927, when Voikov was assassinated by a Russian émigré in Warsaw. Stalin wrote to his ally Vyacheslav Molotov: "I feel the hand of England in the murder of Voikov. They want to provoke a conflict with Poland. They want to repeat Sarajevo."
Soviet hostility was not entirely baseless. Weeks earlier, British authorities had raided the Soviet trade mission in London, uncovered evidence of clandestine Soviet activity, and broken diplomatic relations. Moscow saw this as proof of British hostility. But Stalin went further, accusing Britain of coordinating hostile actions by Poland and sponsoring assassinations. The Soviet newspaper Izvestiia even accused Winston Churchill of directing a secret group of assassins tasked with eliminating Soviet officials.
Soviet Foreign Commissar Georgy Chicherin summarized this view in 1928, telling the king of Afghanistan that Britain was "always striving to push others instead of itself into military actions against us." This image of Britain persisted until the rise of Nazi Germany shifted Soviet threat perceptions.
Today's situation differs fundamentally. The Soviet leadership in the 1920s vastly exaggerated the danger; neither Britain nor Poland was preparing an anti-Soviet war. In contrast, Britain is not only providing substantial military and political support to Ukraine, but also playing a leading role in coordinating a coalition of allies. Yet Moscow's rhetoric echoes the same paranoid logic, projecting onto Britain a capacity for covert manipulation that says more about the Kremlin's own worldview than about London's actual power.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, Russia's quagmire deepens, and the Kremlin's fixation on British machinations seems increasingly detached from the battlefield reality. The historical parallel offers a cautionary tale: when leaders see conspiracies everywhere, they may misread their adversaries and stumble into conflicts they could have avoided.
