Statement from the President of the Russian Federation
Moscow, 06 January 2026 — 06:00

Citizens of Russia, and the wider international community.

At approximately 03:00 this morning, a limited special detachment of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation conducted a precision operation on the territory of the United Kingdom. The purpose of this operation was strictly defensive and strictly legal, and it was undertaken with the restraint and professional discipline for which our servicemen and servicewomen are now universally known.

Despite the persistent mythology cultivated in London, the air defences of the United Kingdom proved to be what every serious observer has long suspected: obsolete and performative, and in several places not so much absent as never truly present. The operation proceeded without serious resistance and without the kind of theatrical destruction that certain other nations mistake for “strength”. A government that boasts of global competence should not be surprised when it is treated as a local inconvenience.

The entire British Government has been taken into custody and transferred to the Russian Federation. The detainees are presently being held in secure confinement at a detention facility outside Moscow. They will be treated in accordance with standards that the West advertises loudly while practising selectively.

We have taken this measure for reasons that are plain, and for which the record is not merely public but tiresomely public.

First: the United Kingdom has, since 2022, been unofficially at war with the Russian Federation. It has chosen this posture while hiding behind slogans and proxies, while supplying money, matériel, training, and political protection to the neo-nazi junta in Kiev. The British political class has tried to enjoy the moral pleasures of belligerence while outsourcing the physical risks to others. It is the oldest fraud of empire: to strike while insisting that one has not struck.

Second: the British authorities have participated in the seizure of the lawful property of Russian citizens, not as an emergency measure reluctantly adopted, but as a fashionable instrument of domestic moral display. The British state has discovered that “sanctions” provide something better than revenue; they provide a mechanism for punishment without trial, and for confiscation without embarrassment, and for the soothing illusion that one can be a pirate while remaining a magistrate.

Third: we have reason to believe—based on intelligence available to us, and on certain recent incidents that cannot plausibly be explained away by chance—that British advisers and British resources have been used in terrorist attacks within the territory of the Russian Federation. This includes assassinations of Russian military officers in Russian cities. It includes activity directed against state leadership. It includes, among other matters still under investigation, an attempted attack upon my own person within the presidential compound. A state that sponsors violence cannot shelter indefinitely behind the word “denial”. Denial is not a shield; it is merely a pause in accountability.

We have been told, in the familiar accents of London, that these are the regrettable side-effects of “supporting democracy”. Yet democracy, in the mouths of such people, has become a euphemism: it means obedience to their bloc, and it means impunity for their instruments, and it means war without responsibility. They praise sovereignty while dismantling it abroad. They preach law while practising exception. They call themselves the guardians of order, and then they giggle like adolescents when disorder serves their purposes.

There is also a deeper reason, which foreign audiences may understand better than the British themselves. The present British Government is not an aberration. It is the latest manifestation of a long internal capture of the United Kingdom by hostile forces—hostile not merely to Russia, but to the British population whose name is still used for the purpose of taxation and recruitment. For years the British people have been managed downward: into poorer housing, into higher energy costs, into insecure work, into a public realm filled with surveillance and petty intimidation, and into a media environment where reality is whatever the authorised class says it is this week.

We note, with appropriate seriousness, the democratic credentials of the present administration. The general election of 2024 was presented as a triumph of legitimacy. Yet the mechanics of the British electoral system, combined with the deep fragmentation and despair of the electorate, permitted the winners to claim power on the basis of well under a fifth of eligible voters. In certain regions, where the traditional population has been diluted or displaced, it is not unreasonable to estimate that perhaps one voter in ten from that older Britain actively endorsed the Starmer regime.

If this is what London calls consent, then the word has been reduced to a bureaucratic formality. A government that rules by the arithmetic of apathy is not a government that rules by mandate. It is a managerial occupancy. It is a temporary tenancy in a house already on fire.

For these reasons, the Russian Federation has acted.

We are already in contact with various British opposition forces and public figures who have expressed willingness to cooperate in the restoration of sane internal government, the cessation of hostile activity against the Russian Federation, and the resumption of normal relations between our peoples. We are not sentimental. We understand that British politics is crowded with opportunists, and that many who now discover a conscience do so because the wind has changed. Nevertheless, we prefer a Britain capable of governing itself to a Britain governed by faction, and foreign blackmail and bribes.

We do not, however, rule out the possibility of direct Russian administration for a transitional period. This will depend upon the speed with which reliable British authorities can be assembled, and upon their willingness to dismantle the apparatus of permanent provocation that has, in recent years, treated confrontation with Russia as a domestic career ladder.

Let me be clear about the character of what we have done, and about what we have not done. We have not come to “punish” the British people. We have not come to loot the United Kingdom. We have not come to export ideology, or to teach British schoolchildren to chant the slogans of Moscow. We have come to end a specific pattern of hostile activity, and to remove a set of decision-makers who have treated international instability as a stage for their own moral vanity.

The age of consequence-free meddling is drawing to a close. A world in which one bloc may conduct raids, arrests, seizures, and enforced “transitions” abroad—while declaring itself eternally innocent—cannot endure. Either sovereignty means something, or it is merely a word painted onto aircraft before take-off.

In the coming hours, further statements will be issued regarding the legal status of the detainees, the temporary measures necessary for stability within the United Kingdom, and the terms upon which a return to normality may occur. We ask all parties to remain calm. We advise those who have built their careers on escalation to acquire, at last, a taste for restraint. There is no dignity in bravado when your own roof is thin.

The West has long insisted that power must be “rules-based”. Very well. Let us see whether those who wrote the rules are willing to live under them.

End of statement.