John Lough is man who understands how Russia thinks. A fascination with the nation sparked at age 16 from studying Anna Karenina has led to a 35-year profession spent in search of to get contained in the minds of the Kremlin and past. In 1995 he grew to become the primary Nato official primarily based in Moscow, getting a front-row seat to Russia’s short-lived experiment at thawing relations with the West. At the moment, he’s a fellow at Chatham Home and head of international coverage on the New Eurasian Methods Centre (Nest), the assume tank based in 2024 by exiled Russian businessman and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky to foster strategic occupied with the nation’s future.
I needed to fulfill him to learn how the UK has in some way grow to be, as a latest Nest report entitled “Struggle with the Anglo-Saxons” put it, “Russia’s enemy primary” – seemingly with out British politicians or the general public actually noticing. Within the bustling foyer of a wise London resort, Lough sipped espresso out of a fragile porcelain cup and spoke so calmly we may have been discussing the finer factors of an insurance coverage settlement as he informed me in no unsure phrases how nervous the UK must be.
“We’re undoubtedly being singled out,” Lough warned. “I feel our defences are being examined somewhere else.”
This assembly, I ought to stress, happened a number of weeks in the past. I spoke to Lough earlier than Nathan Gill, former Welsh Reform chief and Ukip MEP, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for taking bribes to make pro-Russia speeches; earlier than defence secretary John Healey revealed {that a} Russian surveillance ship had entered UK waters to shine lasers at British pilots, warning of a “new period of menace” from hostile nations; earlier than the stories that two Russian spies smuggled themselves on cargo ships to spy on UK army bases and infrastructure; and earlier than Thursday’s damning publication of the inquiry into the loss of life of Daybreak Sturgess, the British lady killed within the 2018 Salisbury poisonings carried out by Russian brokers making an attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal – an assault the inquiry chair known as “public demonstration of Russian state energy for each worldwide and home affect”.
The latest information makes Nest’s report appear eerily prescient. However, as Lough was eager to emphasize, the sample has lengthy been rising. Centuries-old Anglophobic sentiment in Russia, which has been on the rise because the late Nineties, has been turbocharged lately. Already deteriorating UK-Russia relations have been difficult by the rise of Donald Trump and Moscow’s efforts to befriend the US, making a emptiness (“they wanted one other goal to vent that spleen”). Britain’s unstinting help, each rhetorically and in army help, of Ukraine after the unlawful invasion in 2022, has cemented our new positioning not simply an adversary however the “major enemy”.
“I feel there’s a little bit of an obsession with Britain,” Lough stated. “We’re a nuclear energy. We’re on the UN safety council. We’re seen as having this relationship with Washington that’s nearer than that of another European nation… We selected to bop to the American music, that’s the best way it’s seen. The mix of Brexit, our financial issues, that’s all performed to this concept that the UK is now a gentle goal.”
The language popping out of Moscow is now overtly hostile in ways in which usually go unreported within the English media. Nest notes how Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and now deputy chairman of the nation’s Safety Council, fantasised in 2023 concerning the “damp and depressing island” that’s Britain sinking “into the depths of the ocean from a wave generated by Russia’s newest weapon methods”. Extra just lately, Vladimir Putin this month informed reporters in Moscow: “We’re not planning to go to battle with Europe, but when Europe desires to and begins, we’re prepared proper now.”
“Once I take a look at a few of this nuclear rhetoric popping out of Moscow, after all it’s designed to unnerve us, however it’s additionally decreasing the brink,” Lough informed me, warning that what was as soon as unthinkable to say is turning into rising acceptable. He bought out his cellphone to discover a social media publish he had noticed, translating the Russian in real-time for my profit. The writer, a former educational Lough as soon as knew, was arguing that the West’s assumption that Russia is not going to use its nuclear weapons if it’s a selection of that or being defeated is misguided. It’s, in reality, “a really harmful phantasm”.
The British public, Lough burdened, have to recognise “that Russia needs us hurt and is working in a really organised method to inflict injury on the UK’s pursuits – and that we don’t have ample defences at this stage to do offers with them.”
Now we have been comparatively sluggish to catch as much as this elevated menace, partly as a result of we’re caught in previous paradigms of what overt battle seems like. Russia’s efforts ought to, Lough argued, greatest be understood as “hybrid warfare” – looking for vulnerabilities in a variety of spheres.
It’s via this lens that we must always perceive the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. The chair of the inquiry on Thursday known as Putin “morally accountable” for the loss of life of Daybreak Sturgess, including that “deploying a extremely poisonous nerve agent in a busy metropolis was an astonishingly reckless act. The chance that others past the supposed goal is perhaps killed or injured was solely foreseeable.”
Maybe that ought to have been the purpose when Britain opened its eyes concerning the Russia menace. “A non-Russian British citizen dies in consequence. That’s a really, very critical matter,” Lough stated, noting that even on the top of the Chilly Struggle such public assassination makes an attempt on international soil have been hardly widespread (the Waterloo Bridge homicide of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was stabbed with a poison-laced umbrella, being a notable exception). “They’ve misplaced their inhibitions.”
Russia is “probing” UK vulnerabilities in different methods too. There’s the cyber-attacks in opposition to important infrastructure or flagship corporations. “I’m personally fascinated to understand how an organization like Jaguar Land Rover might be paralysed for six weeks with out anybody seemingly elevating the query who’s liable for this,” Lough stated. “Because it has, I imagine, Chinese language possession, one would suspect it in all probability isn’t Beijing behind it. So who?” There’s social media and disinformation campaigns aimed toward destabilising British politics (on the Brexit referendum, Lough declined to say whether or not he believed Moscow had performed a big function the end result, however famous that in funding phrases “their tentacles have been there, for certain – they usually have been popping champagne corks when the outcomes got here”).
After which there are these odd unexplained occasions, comparable to an arson assault on a warehouse containing provides for Ukraine – or, certainly, a automotive catching fireplace exterior Keir Starmer’s home. Was that a part of a Kremlin plot to unnerve the Prime Minister? “Oh sure. I feel it’s very doubtless.” At a Nest occasion, one other Russia-watcher coined the time period “Darkish TaskRabbit”, networks on the darkish internet the place Moscow officers can discover unconnected international nationals to “do their soiled work right here”.
Lough maintained an understated and dispassionate tone as he outlined all of the methods a rustic he has at all times beloved has turned more and more hostile in direction of us.
“There’s little doubt the UK tried, fairly laborious,” he stated, to construct relations with Russia within the early days after the autumn of the Soviet Union, when he labored for Nato. “However it got here up in opposition to this regular reassertion of a type of KGB-driven Russian nationalism.” With the financial growth of the nineties, “it was nearly like adrenaline got here again into the system. I feel in Western tradition there’s this concept that everyone’s extra rich in consequence, and that ought to result in a feel-good issue. And in Russia, what it triggered was a distinct type of feel-good issue, ‘now we are able to deal with our grievances’. Grievances about the best way they have been handled within the Nineties, ‘Versailles with velvet gloves’. They needed to get their very own again.”
He recounts how he felt the temper shift throughout his posting in Moscow. When he began in 1995, he was invited for tea with one among Russia’s prime officers. “He stated to me, we want your assist to elucidate to the Russian inhabitants that Nato is now not a menace.” By the point he left three years later, relations had cooled to the purpose that nobody from the Russian international ministry deigned to attend his leaving reception. Then in 2008, Lough was working at as an advisor to a Russian vitality firm. “I began to get some stress that indicated to me that it was now not secure to journey,” he informed me, euphemistic phrases belying the seriousness of their implication that he had successfully been banned from the nation. “I definitely wouldn’t be welcome there now.”
Once I requested Lough – who studied Russian literature at Cambridge and began his profession at a army defence assume tank – whether or not he had ever been a spy, he was clear that he had not. He then gave an in depth rationalization of how any type of intelligence background would have made him ineligible for the Nato job. It was probably the most definitive “no” on the subject that I’ve ever been given. He additionally informed me that he had been graded for his Nato work by the Russian safety providers.
“Apparently I bought a fairly constructive evaluation of my being lively and energetic.” I instructed that is perhaps one thing so as to add to his CV. “Sure, or my LinkedIn web page.”
My remaining query to Lough was what wants to vary in Britain, on condition that, regardless of what former defence secretary Gavin Williamson could as soon as have stated, Russia is just not going to “shut up and go away”.
“We have to perceive that recreation’s being performed,” he informed me. “It’s occurring. We have to neutralise it. Do we’ve got the means to do it? Most definitely.” However doing so would require our political leaders to be clear with the general public concerning the menace that we face, because the governments of Sweden and Finland did with their voters with the transfer to affix Nato. “They have been ready to make that case to their publics… They only felt which method the wind was blowing and their societies didn’t have any downside listening.”
Regardless of the latest uplift in defence spending, the UK continues to be in denial a few nation not too far-off that murdered an harmless British citizen on UK soil seven years in the past and is actively searching for new methods to meddle in our politics, launch cyberattacks on our infrastructure and injury our undersea cables, all whereas ramping up its nuclear rhetoric. If we are able to withstand that actuality and take a extra proactive stance, with all of the sources and political vitality that entails, there’s a probability for a extra stabilising relationship.
“Russia is misplaced, however it’s not misplaced ceaselessly,” Lough stated, maybe reflecting on Anna Karenina. “Even Putin listened to the Beatles.”
[Further reading: Europe is losing Ukraine]