MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Britain should no longer be called “Britain” because it was the only country in the world that officially called itself “great”.
“I think Britain should simply be called Great Britain, because ‘Great Britain’ is the only example of a country that calls itself ‘great,'” Lavrov told reporters, referring to colonialism after his comments on Greenland.
His spokesman later put a question to UK Sky News reporter Ivor Bennett. “No offense intended,” Lavrov said.
Lavrov said that another example of a self-proclaimed “great” country is the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” led by Muammar Gaddafi.
“But it doesn’t exist anymore.”
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is commonly known in Russian as “Velikobritaniya”, meaning Great Britain.
Just as the United States, under Donald Trump, seeks to reset relations with Moscow and broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, Britain has been given the status of Russia’s public enemy number one.
On Russian state television, “Perfidious Albion,” a term often used by news anchors, is portrayed as a scheming global intelligence force that intervenes behind the scenes from Washington to Iran to double-cross Russian interests around the world.
Britain says Russia poses a threat to Europe. During the war in Ukraine, Russia and Western countries have repeatedly accused each other of conducting intensive espionage operations not seen since the Cold War.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldakin and Dmitry Antonov; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Alexandra Hudson)
