MOSCOW, Jan 20 (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Britain should no longer be called Great Britain as it was the only country in the world to officially name itself “Great”.
“I think that Britain should be called simply Britain because ‘Great Britain’ is the only example of a country which calls itself ‘Great’,” Lavrov told reporters as he spoke about colonialism following comments on Greenland.
His spokeswoman then gave Ivor Bennett, a correspondent from Britain’s Sky News, a question. “No offence,” Lavrov said.
Lavrov said another example of a country which called itself “great” was the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” led by Muammar Gaddafi.
“But it no longer exists.”
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is usually called “Velikobritaniya”, or Great Britain, in Russian.
As the U.S. under Donald Trump seeks to reset ties with Moscow and broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, Britain has been granted the status of Russia’s public enemy number one.
On Russian state television, “Perfidious Albion”, a term used frequently by news anchors, is cast as a scheming global intelligence power that is meddling behind the scenes from Washington to Iran in a duplicitous bid to undermine Russian interests across the world.
Britain says Russia is a threat to Europe. Amid the war in Ukraine, Russia and the West have repeatedly accused each other of unfurling espionage campaigns of an intensity not seen since the depths of the Cold War.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Dmitry Antonov; editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Alexandra Hudson)
