There is a war being waged against Britain, and it is not fought with tanks or missiles but with fabricated stories, manipulated images, and a relentless flood of digital poison. According to new analysis shared with The Independent, Russia’s disinformation machine has reached a terrifying new intensity, with Kremlin-backed media outlets and state-affiliated actors pushing hundreds of thousands of stories designed to convince Britons that their country is ungovernable, defenceless, and deserving of Moscow’s hostility. The risk intelligence firm Osavul, which tracks global hybrid threats and supplies technology to Nato, found that Russian state-affiliated media produced around 40,365 stories about the UK in September alone, a jump of roughly 15 per cent, with similarly intense volumes continuing into October. These stories were not random noise; they were targeted, coordinated, and distributed across platforms to reach a combined audience of 1.37 billion people. Some were absurdly fake, while others twisted real events into terrifying narratives. But all of them served a single purpose: to leave British readers with a lower opinion of their own state, and to convince readers abroad that Britain is no longer a serious power. This is not merely propaganda in the old-fashioned sense. It is an information assault, engineered to exploit every crack in the country’s social and political fabric, and experts warn that it is only going to get worse.
To understand how this plays out in practice, consider some of the stories that Russian state media have been spreading. One false claim insisted that the UK had bombed the Russian city of Voronezh with Storm Shadow missiles. Another bizarre story said British police were threatening to arrest people for using air conditioners. There were posts claiming that Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, was “powerless to stop the UK’s collapse,” and warnings of widespread power cuts and an energy crisis after British media reported the possibility of blackouts in winter. These stories were wildly exaggerated or entirely invented, yet they were shared thousands of times and designed to feel plausible enough to fuel anger and anxiety. Perhaps most insidiously, Russian actors took a real event—the resignation of Sir Keir Starmer and the collapse of his Labour government—and framed it as being “marred by a rampage by gangs that carried out the sexual exploitation of children,” a reference to criticism over the government’s handling of a grooming gangs probe. Osavul identified 1,019 messages from 172 accounts classified as “high risk for information manipulation” around Starmer’s resignation, collectively garnering 93,548 engagements. Another thread falsely claimed that Nato had conducted missile strikes on Russia from the London Underground, after UK forces used a disused tube platform to simulate operations in the event of an attack. And when Iran-linked hackers shut down a small power plant in July, Russian media transformed it into a story about British energy systems being vulnerable to hostile actors. That narrative drew 337 messages from 117 high-risk accounts and received 1.89 million views in just five days. The government insisted there was never a risk to the wider grid, but that reassurance was absent from every version of the story. As Osavul put it, this was “the clearest case of a true event being reframed to produce fear of state weakness.”
Why has Russia escalated so dramatically? The answer lies in a shifting geopolitical landscape. With Donald Trump forging a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin, Britain has replaced the United States as Russia’s primary adversary in the eyes of the Kremlin. Britain’s strong support for Ukraine makes it an obvious target, and Russian state media increasingly describe the UK as an enemy that is “deliberately opting for escalation.” Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, explained that Russia’s goal is not necessarily to make people believe a specific lie, but to create an environment of confusion and distrust. He pointed to the Brexit referendum as an example of Russia stirring an emotive issue to set people against each other, rather than simply trying to boost one side’s vote. “Russia gets the best result by constantly working in the background to change attitudes, change perceptions, and through doing that, change the political stance of the target country,” he said. Andy Pryce, a former British diplomat and fellow at the defence and security think tank Rusi, noted that state-media conversations about the UK being an adversary “dramatically increased after the Trump administration sat down with the Russian government in Riyadh in February 2025.” Authoritarian governments, he observed, usually need a foreign enemy to point to, and with the United States no longer playing that role, Britain has been cast as the villain. To make matters worse, artificial intelligence is turbocharging Russia’s ability to spread disinformation, making campaigns faster, cheaper, and far more effective. The Kremlin no longer needs armies of human trolls; it can use algorithms to generate endless variations of its messages, adapting them to local contexts and vulnerabilities.
Few have watched this with more alarm than Sir Bill Browder, the anti-Putin campaigner and corruption fighter who has become one of the Kremlin’s most vocal critics. Browder told The Independent that Russian disinformation campaigns have already had “very big success” in the UK, and he warned that without urgent government action, the situation could “get exponentially worse.” He pointed to the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence as a game-changer, saying, “I don’t think we’ve even begun to see how AI will be used in this whole thing.” Browder has spent years campaigning against Russian corruption and has seen firsthand how the Kremlin weaponises information to destroy its enemies. He is convinced that the UK government has the power to push back, but he believes it has been too timid. “Enough is enough,” he said. “We’ve sat around and watched all this stuff go on for a long time. We know it exists. We know it has absolutely vicious effects on our democracy and our society, and we should stop this from happening. We have the ability to stop it; it just requires some brave policy-making.” His frustration is shared by others who have studied Russia’s tactics. The sheer volume of disinformation, Osavul noted, means that anyone searching in English for news about Britain’s politics, security, or constitutional future will find a meaningful share of what they encounter has been shaped by Moscow. This is not a fringe problem; it is a systemic threat to the country’s ability to govern itself.
The official response, at least, has begun to take shape. Last month, the prime minister unveiled plans for a new National Centre for Information Defence, describing Britain as having been subjected to an “industrial-scale assault” by hostile states. The centre is intended to strengthen the UK’s ability to detect, attribute, and disrupt hostile information attacks from foreign adversaries, working alongside intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and social media companies. A government spokesperson said the goal is to ensure the UK has the defensive capability necessary to combat information warfare and build national resilience. This is a welcome step, but critics argue it is not enough. Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister and ex-Army captain, called the disinformation threat to the UK “huge” and said social media has dramatically increased the danger. He argued that national security must be the priority, and that social media platforms are now “front and centre” of adversaries’ efforts to sow societal discord. That demands a wider discussion about how to immediately remove falsehoods from the narrative. Alicia Kearns, the shadow national security minister who has specialised in Russian disinformation, described the threat as significant because it is a “low-entry, easy, and cheap method to undermine confidence in governments.” She called for more education in schools to teach people to think critically and challenge information, and for the government to counter disinformation during major incidents that Russia might seek to exploit. The challenge, however, is that regulation and education take time, while disinformation spreads in seconds.
This is not simply a matter of winning an information war; it is about defending the very idea of truth in a democratic society. The Russian strategy is not to convince everyone that the UK is evil, but to create enough confusion that people stop believing anything at all. If citizens cannot agree on basic facts, they cannot hold their leaders accountable. If they lose faith in elections, media, and institutions, they become vulnerable to the very authoritarian politics that the Kremlin wants to promote. The threat is not abstract or distant. It is happening now, in the feeds and timelines of ordinary Britons, in the moments when they scroll past a headline and feel a flicker of doubt. The answer is not to panic or to retreat into censorship, but to build a society that is resilient enough to recognise manipulation and strong enough to reject it. That means deeper regulation of social media platforms, as Sir Bill Browder urges. It means better media literacy in schools and a more vigorous public conversation about how information is weaponised. And it means that those in power must be honest about the danger, rather than pretending that a single new centre will solve everything. Russia’s disinformation war on the UK is a test of the country’s nerve. It is a test that Britain cannot afford to fail. The stories will keep coming, the lies will keep spreading, and the algorithms will keep learning. But the defenders of democracy have an advantage, if they choose to use it: the truth, however messy, is ultimately more powerful than any fabrication. The question is whether the nation has the courage to fight for it, before the digital fog becomes too thick to see through.