John Lough is man who understands how Russia thinks. A fascination with the country sparked at age 16 from reading Anna Karenina has led to a 35-year career spent seeking to get inside the minds of the Kremlin and beyond. In 1995 he became the first Nato official based in Moscow, getting a front-row seat to Russia’s short-lived experiment at thawing relations with the West. Today, he’s a fellow at Chatham House and head of foreign policy at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre (Nest), the think tank founded in 2024 by exiled Russian businessman and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky to foster strategic thinking about the country’s future.
I wanted to meet him to find out how the UK has somehow become, as a recent Nest report entitled “War with the Anglo-Saxons” put it, “Russia’s enemy number one” – seemingly without British politicians or the public really noticing. In the bustling lobby of a smart London hotel, Lough sipped coffee out of a delicate porcelain cup and spoke so calmly we could have been discussing the finer points of an insurance agreement as he told me in no uncertain terms how worried the UK should be.
“We are definitely being singled out,” Lough warned. “I think our defences are being tested in different places.”
This meeting, I should stress, took place a few weeks ago. I spoke to Lough before Nathan Gill, former Welsh Reform leader and Ukip MEP, was sentenced to ten years in prison for taking bribes to make pro-Russia speeches; before defence secretary John Healey revealed that a Russian surveillance ship had entered UK waters to shine lasers at British pilots, warning of a “new era of threat” from hostile countries; before the reports that two Russian spies smuggled themselves on cargo ships to spy on UK military bases and infrastructure; and before Thursday’s damning publication of the inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess, the British woman killed in the 2018 Salisbury poisonings carried out by Russian agents attempting to assassinate Sergei Skripal – an attack the inquiry chair called “public demonstration of Russian state power for both international and domestic impact”.
The recent news makes Nest’s report seem eerily prescient. But, as Lough was keen to stress, the pattern has long been emerging. Centuries-old Anglophobic sentiment in Russia, which has been on the rise since the late Nineties, has been turbocharged in recent years. Already deteriorating UK-Russia relations were complicated by the rise of Donald Trump and Moscow’s efforts to befriend the US, creating a vacancy (“they needed another target to vent that spleen”). Britain’s unstinting support, both rhetorically and in military assistance, of Ukraine after the illegal invasion in 2022, has cemented our new positioning not just an adversary but the “main enemy”.
“I think there’s a bit of an obsession with Britain,” Lough said. “We are a nuclear power. We are on the UN security council. We’re seen as having this relationship with Washington that is closer than that of any other European country… We chose to dance to the American music, that’s the way it’s seen. The combination of Brexit, our economic problems, that’s all played to this idea that the UK is now a soft target.”
The language coming out of Moscow is now openly hostile in ways that often go unreported in the English media. Nest notes how Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and now deputy chairman of the country’s Security Council, fantasised in 2023 about the “damp and miserable island” that is Britain sinking “into the depths of the sea from a wave generated by Russia’s latest weapon systems”. More recently, Vladimir Putin this month told reporters in Moscow: “We are not planning to go to war with Europe, but if Europe wants to and starts, we are ready right now.”
“When I look at some of this nuclear rhetoric coming out of Moscow, of course it’s designed to unnerve us, but it’s also lowering the threshold,” Lough told me, warning that what was once unthinkable to say is becoming increasing acceptable. He got out his phone to find a social media post he had spotted, translating the Russian in real-time for my benefit. The author, a former academic Lough once knew, was arguing that the West’s assumption that Russia will not use its nuclear weapons if it’s a choice of that or being defeated is misguided. It is, in fact, “a very dangerous illusion”.
The British public, Lough stressed, need to recognise “that Russia wishes us harm and is working in a very organised way to inflict damage on the UK’s interests – and that we don’t have sufficient defences at this stage to do deals with them.”
We have been relatively slow to catch up to this increased threat, in part because we are stuck in past paradigms of what overt conflict looks like. Russia’s efforts should, Lough argued, best be understood as “hybrid warfare” – searching for vulnerabilities in a range of spheres.
It is through this lens that we should understand the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. The chair of the inquiry on Thursday called Putin “morally responsible” for the death of Dawn Sturgess, adding that “deploying a highly toxic nerve agent in a busy city was an astonishingly reckless act. The risk that others beyond the intended target might be killed or injured was entirely foreseeable.”
Perhaps that should have been the point when Britain opened its eyes about the Russia threat. “A non-Russian British citizen dies as a result. That’s a very, very serious matter,” Lough said, noting that even at the height of the Cold War such public assassination attempts on foreign soil were hardly common (the Waterloo Bridge murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was stabbed with a poison-laced umbrella, being a notable exception). “They have lost their inhibitions.”
Russia is “probing” UK vulnerabilities in other ways too. There’s the cyber-attacks against critical infrastructure or flagship companies. “I’m personally fascinated to know how a company like Jaguar Land Rover can be paralysed for six weeks without anyone seemingly raising the question who’s responsible for this,” Lough said. “Since it has, I believe, Chinese ownership, one would suspect it probably isn’t Beijing behind it. So who?” There’s social media and disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilising British politics (on the Brexit referendum, Lough declined to say whether he believed Moscow had played a significant role the outcome, but noted that in funding terms “their tentacles were there, for sure – and they were popping champagne corks when the results came”).
And then there are those odd unexplained events, such as an arson attack on a warehouse containing supplies for Ukraine – or, indeed, a car catching fire outside Keir Starmer’s house. Was that part of a Kremlin plot to unnerve the Prime Minister? “Oh yes. I think it’s very likely.” At a Nest event, another Russia-watcher coined the term “Dark TaskRabbit”, networks on the dark web where Moscow officials can find unconnected foreign nationals to “do their dirty work here”.
Lough maintained an understated and dispassionate tone as he outlined all the ways a country he has always loved has turned increasingly hostile towards us.
“There’s no doubt the UK tried, quite hard,” he said, to build relations with Russia in the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, when he worked for Nato. “But it came up against this steady reassertion of a form of KGB-driven Russian nationalism.” With the economic boom of the nineties, “it was almost like adrenaline came back into the system. I think in Western culture there’s this idea that everybody’s more wealthy as a result, and that should lead to a feel-good factor. And in Russia, what it triggered was a different kind of feel-good factor, ‘now we can address our grievances’. Grievances about the way they were treated in the 1990s, ‘Versailles with velvet gloves’. They wanted to get their own back.”
He recounts how he felt the mood shift during his posting in Moscow. When he started in 1995, he was invited for tea with one of Russia’s top officials. “He said to me, we need your help to explain to the Russian population that Nato is no longer a threat.” By the time he left three years later, relations had cooled to the point that no one from the Russian foreign ministry deigned to attend his leaving reception. Then in 2008, Lough was working at as an advisor to a Russian energy company. “I started to get some pressure that indicated to me that it was no longer safe to travel,” he told me, euphemistic words belying the seriousness of their implication that he had effectively been banned from the country. “I certainly would not be welcome there now.”
When I asked Lough – who studied Russian literature at Cambridge and started his career at a military defence think tank – whether he had ever been a spy, he was clear that he had not. He then gave a detailed explanation of how any kind of intelligence background would have made him ineligible for the Nato job. It was the most definitive “no” on the topic that I have ever been given. He also told me that he had been graded for his Nato work by the Russian security services.
“Apparently I got a quite positive assessment of my being active and energetic.” I suggested that might be something to add to his CV. “Yes, or my LinkedIn page.”
My final question to Lough was what needs to change in Britain, given that, despite what former defence secretary Gavin Williamson may once have said, Russia is not going to “shut up and go away”.
“We need to understand that game’s being played,” he told me. “It’s happening. We need to neutralise it. Do we have the means to do it? Most certainly.” But doing so will require our political leaders to be clear with the public about the threat that we face, as the governments of Sweden and Finland did with their voters with the move to join Nato. “They were prepared to make that case to their publics… They just felt which way the wind was blowing and their societies didn’t have any problem listening.”
Despite the recent uplift in defence spending, the UK is still in denial about a country not too far away that killed an innocent British citizen on UK soil seven years ago and is actively looking for new ways to meddle in our politics, launch cyberattacks on our infrastructure and damage our undersea cables, all while ramping up its nuclear rhetoric. If we can face up to that reality and take a more proactive stance, with all the resources and political energy that involves, there is a chance for a more stabilising relationship.
“Russia is lost, but it’s not lost forever,” Lough said, perhaps reflecting on Anna Karenina. “Even Putin listened to the Beatles.”
[Further reading: Europe is losing Ukraine]
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