The embassy accused<\/a> the UK government of \u201cseeking to contain Russia and inflict maximum damage on it by proxy\u201d. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, described<\/a> Britain as \u201cmethodically and regularly\u201d fuelling war and \u201chatching schemes\u201d to sabotage peace. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned<\/a> that British military targets could now be attacked because of Ukrainian strikes using British weapons.<\/p>\n The UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, responded by reaffirming Britain\u2019s position, saying the UK would \u201csupport Ukraine 100%\u201d<\/a>. <\/p>\n But Russia is presenting Britain not simply one of Ukraine\u2019s principal supporters, but an influential member of an anti-Russian coalition, operating behind the scenes and pursuing its objectives through proxies. <\/p>\n The Kremlin\u2019s messaging is crediting the UK with outsized influence. But this image of British power closely resembles Soviet thinking exactly 100 years ago. In the mid-1920s, the Soviet leadership made similar accusations about British support for another country on its western border. This time it was Poland.<\/p>\n Poland and Soviet Russia had fought a bitter war in 1919\u201320, ending in a stunning Soviet defeat<\/a>. Soviet hostility towards Poland was therefore hardly surprising. Nor was distrust of Britain, which had intervened<\/a> in the early years of the \u201cRussian civil war\u201d in support of the Bolsheviks\u2019 enemies, the counter-revolutionary \u201cWhite Armies\u201d.<\/p>\n But by the mid-1920s, these real antagonisms had become entangled with a conspiratorial understanding of international politics. Britain, still the world\u2019s preeminent imperial power, increasingly appeared in Soviet thinking as the hidden hand behind apparently independent threats to the USSR. <\/p>\n Poland, in this way, occupied a position remarkably like that assigned to Ukraine in Russian rhetoric today. Soviet officials struggled to imagine Poland acting entirely on its own. From the early 1920s, Soviet military intelligence and the security services reported that Britain was actively organising an anti-Soviet bloc including Poland and other border countries that could be pushed into war against the fledgling Soviet Union.<\/p>\n These suspicions deepened in May 1926 when J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski, a nationalist figure who had led the Polish Army to victory in 1920, seized power<\/a> in Poland. Senior Soviet officials interpreted Pi\u0142sudski\u2019s coup as having been inspired by Britain.<\/p>\n The head of the increasingly powerful soviet secret police, the OGPU, Feliks Dzerzhinsky<\/a>, was convinced the coup was \u201centirely supported by England\u201d and warned Josef Stalin that Poland now intended to seize Ukraine and Belarus. Another intelligence assessment from senior police officials described Pi\u0142sudski vividly as Britain\u2019s \u201cguard dog\u201d in eastern Europe. <\/p>\n Reports from influential figures such as the Soviet representative in Warsaw, Pyotr Voikov<\/a> and Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov<\/a> \u2013 who arguably had access to better information and who contradicted this narrative \u2013 struggled to be heard. When Litvinov complained about the Soviet tendency to see \u201cthe malevolent hand of the British government everywhere\u201d, Stalin disagreed. He insisted that there was an international conspiracy against the Soviet Union, which would make another war inevitable.<\/p>\n Fears that Britain would manipulate Poland into war intensified in June 1927, when Voikov was assassinated by a Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 in Warsaw. Stalin immediately wrote to his closest ally, Vyacheslav Molotov: \u201cI feel the hand of England in the murder of Voikov. They want to provoke a conflict with Poland. They want to repeat Sarajevo.\u201d<\/p>\n Soviet hostility was not entirely detached from reality. Only weeks earlier, British authorities had raided the Soviet trade mission in London and uncovered what it said was evidence of clandestine Soviet activity and had broken off diplomatic relations<\/a>. This was seen in Moscow as evidence of British hostility towards the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n But Stalin went considerably further, insisting that Britain was coordinating hostile activity against the Soviets by countries such as Poland and sponsoring assassinations. In the days following the Voikov murder, the main Soviet newspaper Izvestiia accused<\/a> Winston Churchill of directing a secret group of assassins, charged with the elimination of Soviet officials.<\/p>\n![\"Marshall](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/757750\/original\/file-20260903-50-s09v90.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
\n Marian Fuks\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe \u2018hand of England\u2019<\/h2>\n
![\"US](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/757762\/original\/file-20260903-50-h75zfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
\n Winston Churchill collection.<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.com\/content\/291184\/count.gif\")
<\/p>\n