London Exaggerates Its Importance in Russia’s Politics, Ambassador Says

London significantly overestimates its importance in the Russian politics by constantly accusing Moscow of meddling into the United Kingdom’s internal affairs, Russia’s UK Ambassador Andrei Kelin said in an interview with Daily Mail.

“I feel that Britain exaggerates, very much, its place in Russian thinking. The scope and place of Great Britain in Russian politics is not that big. We have other problems of much larger magnitude,” the ambassador said.

Kelin once again rejected claims that Russia somehow tried to affect the results of the 2014 Scotland independence referendum, the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 parliamentary elections in the UK. According to the diplomat, in all this cases Russia was not politically interested in any particular outcome. “For us, there is no sense to choose any side,” he said, TASS writes.

“These accusations are invented, if not to say false. These are senseless accusations which we do not understand,” the ambassador added.

Kelin went on to say that at present, the relations between Moscow and London are ‘close to being frozen’. The UK is throwing ‘a lot of mud… in our direction,’ he added, and this type of attitude “does not provoke much of an appetite for improving dialogue or relations in Moscow”.