All The Times The Russian Embassy Twitter Account Has Trolled The UK

From Esquire

The Twitter account for Russia's embassy in the UK (@RussianEmbassy) has been a complex and jarring mixture of hardball propaganda, snide topical wisecracking and gentle surrealism, but it's getting to the point where it feels like it's a side project by Limmy or Pixelated Boat.

Now, it feels like it's hit a zenith. @RussianEmbassy will often go a breezy 'Good morning!' tweet with a nice picture of a dawn breaking, and usually it's something like a lovely rolling hillside with a quirky little shack on it.

Today, though - in the aftermath of the two men the UK government suspects of the Skripal poisoning claiming that they flew to Britain, stayed in London, went to Salisbury, came back from Salisbury, went back to Salisbury again the next day, came home after half an hour and flew back to Russia within 48 hours of arriving, all so they could see Salisbury's famous cathedral with its 132-metre spire - it was this.

Which is very blackly funny, as was a shout-out for the Russian territory of Salisbury Island, part of an archipeligo in the far north. There was this 'warning' to Russian tourists too.

The @RussianEmbassy account is on a bit of a roll at the moment - in between defending Russia's military interventions abroad and accusing Western governments of staging chemical attacks as a pretext to launch more air strikes, that is - but it's been needling the UK government and journalists for a while now. It occasionally gets quite huffy about bad reviews of Russian films, but it's been equally keen to turn Britain's most cherished screen icons against us when the opportunity arises.

Not to mention shoehorning references to our literary icons into nearly-but-not-quite-sensical jibes.

It's almost Dadaist, isn't it? Then there was the one with the Year 8 science lesson PowerPoint slides.

And the one which felt like the kind of meme your mum would post on your Facebook wall because she thought it was cute, not realising that it had been made by a rabidly pro-Sarah Palin Tea Party group.

In fact there was an extended period where it was so 'sassy-mum-on-Facebook' that it felt like we were days away from seeing "After attacking Syria under false pretext in April, US/UK/France are again considering 'action' in case of 'further use' of chemical weapons. Baseless statements, let alone baseless military actions, do not help achieve peace!" written in Comic Sans over a picture of some Minions.

It made its name with bizarre not-quite-memes and ham-fisted West-baiting, but of late @RussianEmbassy settled into the kind of extremely sly sarcasm which is Twitter catnip, while also trying to take chunks out of the Western political consensus. Maybe an approach to think about when you see the ratio on your hot take about Sharp Objects going south.

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