📺 Watch Ambassador Andrei Kelin's interview with BBC Radio 4 presenter James Coomarasamy (16 April 2026)

Key topics:
• Current state and future of Russia–UK relations
• UK's threats to seize Russia-linked trade ships
• Peace negotiations on Ukraine
• European remilitarisation and security architecture
• Iran war and its geopolitical consequences
• Elections in Hungary

💬 Andrei Kelin: Sending 120,000 UK drones to the Kiev regime will only prolong the suffering in Ukraine and the war itself. This only proves that the UK does not want a settlement. It confirms our worst suspicions that European countries, especially the UK, which would like to play a leading role in these efforts, want to prolong the conflict rather than stop it [...]

Russia and Europe are very closely connected. If the Europeans do not encourage Ukraine to stand against Russia, there will be peace and an absence of tension in Europe for a long time. We can do this unless London continues to think in terms of deterrence with regard to Russia.

Watch the interview on our YouTube channel

🕯 Russia marks today, for the first time, the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People — a memorial date established by presidential decree on 29 December 2025.

The choice of 19 April is deliberate: on this day in 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree formally recognising the systematic Nazi campaign to exterminate the civilian population of the USSR.

The term “genocide of the Soviet people” denotes a coordinated campaign of destruction carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945.

Rooted in racial ideology and expansionist doctrine, plans such as Generalplan Ost envisaged the depopulation and colonisation of vast territories. Civilians were subjected to mass executions, starvation, forced labour and deportation, while entire communities were wiped out.

Historians estimate that some 13.7 million Soviet citizens perished as a direct result of these policies, with a further five million dying from a deliberately engineered famine. Jews, Roma, Slavs and others, labelled “subhuman” under the doctrine of Lebensraum, were targeted for total or partial annihilation.

19 April stands as both a memorial and a warning: that the consequences of ideology-driven violence, left unchallenged, reverberate far beyond their time.

Preserving the memory of millions of victims of the genocide of the Soviet people is our sacred duty. We will not allow these atrocities to be consigned to oblivion, no matter how hard those who today seek once again to steer Europe down the well-trodden path of racial superiority may try.

— Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

#WeRemember

On 19 April, Frank Chester passed away at the age of 109.

He had served aboard a Royal Navy corvette on the Arctic convoys, running war supplies to the Soviet Union through the Barents Sea in conditions that Churchill described as the worst journey in the world. Storms, pack ice, enemy submarines and aircraft were there on every voyage.

In 2014, Russia awarded him the Medal of Ushakov, in recognition of the courage shown by the men who kept that lifeline open.

As we approach the 81st anniversary of Victory, the passing of Frank Chester is a reminder of how much we owe to those who sailed the Northern Route. They were young men from Shropshire and Worcestershire and dozens of other places, far from home, doing something extraordinary in the cold and dark for our common Victory.

Russia remembers them. We are grateful.
Rest in peace, Frank Chester.

#Opinion

📰 Excerpt from an article by Astrid Barltrop, winner of the The Guardian Foundation’s 2026 Emerging Voices award, published in The Guardian.

💬 When British colonial history is studied, what is scrutinised and critiqued is not the principle of colonialism, but the efficiency with which the British colonised [...]

Our curricula sing tales of “great men” but are silent about the colonised. Twelve years after Michael Gove’s tenure as education secretary, we are still memorising the feats of imperial “heroes” rather than reading colonial history from reflective and inclusive perspectives – such as the perspectives of its victims.

Take, for example, my Edexcel module Britain: losing and gaining an empire, 1763-1914. When we A-level students learn about the 1857 Indian uprising, we study the “strengths” and “weaknesses” of British governor generals. Yet their role in orchestrating the 1770 great Bengal famine – killing 10 million people – is somehow absent from the specification.

Why do our history curricula still project selective amnesia? Fear of diminishing British identity? [...]

From the Balfour declaration to the great Irish famine, the legacies of British colonialism still reverberate across the world. Former colonies know far more of – and look far more critically on – our shared history than we do in Britain, as reactions to the queen’s death in 2022 across the Commonwealth highlighted [...]

It might be difficult to teach the British empire. It might be uncomfortable to shift focus from its “successes” to its human costs. There would surely be objection from the imperial nostalgists. But these are not good excuses for teaching ignorance [...]

Critical colonial history is urgently necessary – politically, socially and morally.