On Sunday morning, the official Russian embassy to the UK Twitter account posted a photograph of flower petals in Sochi lit up in the sunshine.
But it soon moved on to politics. “It is deplorable that @BorisJohnson found himself unfit to stand Western ground on Syria in bilateral talks with Sergey Lavrov,” the embassy said, in reference to the foreign secretary cancelling a planned visit to Moscow while US secretary of state Rex Tillerson goes ahead with his.
It illustrated the tweet with a painting of the charge of the Light Brigade, when Russian gunners decimated British cavalry during the Crimean ar.
“If G7 ultimatum to Russia brings us to real war, what is your trust in @realDonaldTrump as a wartime leader & @BorisJohnson as his lieutenant?” it asked followers in a mocking Twitter poll.
Johnson is by no means the only politician to be trolled by the embassy account, which mixes snarky broadsides with photos of staid outreach events and trivia about Russian culture and history.
After Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats over accusations of Russian hacking during the US election, it tweeted a picture of a duck with the word “lame” superimposed on top of it, and said that everybody “will be glad to see the last of this hapless” administration.
In January, it included a picture Pepe the Frog – a cartoon so beloved by the alt-right that the Anti-Defamation League has listed it as a hate symbol – in a tweet referencing Theresa May.
In response to defence secretary Michael Fallon’s assertion on Sunday that last week’s chemical attack in Syria “happened on [Russia’s] watch,” the embassy account tweeted that “civil war in Syria was fed by expectations based on Libya as precedent” with a photograph of a bloodied former leader Muammar Gaddafi.
While the account has only 50,000 followers, its more outrageous tweets often go viral – the Johnson poll was retweeted hundreds of times – or are picked up by the media.
The tirades against western governments and publications dovetail with the messages of a wider Russian propaganda and misinformation campaign that lawmakers worried about interference in upcoming European elections. In February, Fallon accused Russia of weaponising information and helping to create the fake news phenomenon, and the Kremlin has been linked to an online troll army promoting the Russian agenda.
Charlie Beckett, media and communications professor at the London School of Economics, said the embassy account had found a ready audience among users who were already skeptical of the west. “[It] is trying to sow mistrust and disaffection. It’s pretty marginal … but it has a nice marginal impact, and Russia Today and Sputnik have the same goals.”
Asked about the author of its Twitter account, the Russian embassy told the Guardian that “work with social media is a collective activity”. But some in Moscow have speculated that the more inflammatory tweets may be written by ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary Alexander Kramarenko, whose official statements have expressed similar arguments. Born in 1952, he worked at the Russian embassy in Canada in the 1990s and has been a high-ranking aide at the embassy in Britain since 2011.
In a wide-ranging essay published in January, Kramarenko drew a long analogy with the first world war to lambast Europe’s “crusade against cultural differences and history” and “artificial” suspicions of Russia, while praising Donald Trump’s “willingness to engage” with Moscow.
The Russian embassy in the UK has also registered people on its mailing list on a questionable app that automatically retweets ambassador Alexander Yakovenko.
Beckett said that the Russian embassy could get away with provocative tweets because of the country’s misinformation campaign and claims of being a victim of western aggression.
“If you’re trying to be disruptive generally, being a little edgy on Twitter works very well in their strategy,” he said.
