The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) today issued a release titled “Traumas of the Past Torment British Puppetmasters.” It reported the SVR’s finding that Kiev’s June 10 drone attack which destroyed the Museum of the Defense of Sevastopol, in that city, and the large Franz Roubaud mural it housed, “was a provocation planned in detail by London and its secret services.” The SVR alleges that Ukrainians may have prepared and launched the drones without knowing what the target was, as “the flight assignment was loaded into the weapons by British specialists, present as military advisors.”
The SVR release turned to history: “Why have the British latched on to the panorama of the heroic defense of the city during the Crimean War of 1853-1856? … The point is that London largely perceives the Ukraine conflict as an attempt at revenge for the project of a strategic defeat of Russia that went unrealized in the 19th century. The museum was a historical trigger, awakening in the British painful recollections of that difficult military campaign, which brought colossal losses among the United Kingdom’s upper elite. “ (Think of Tennyson’s commemoration of the Battle of Balaclava: “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.") “Thus, for arrogant Albion burning the panorama was an act of destroying evidence of Russian soldiers’ heroism.”
The SVR concluded, “It is sad that London has not learned the lessons of the past. We are sure that for this attack, as for many other barbaric crimes against the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, the British will nonetheless have to answer.”
One lesson of history not mentioned by the SVR is that Russia’s ultimate defeat in the Crimean War helped to inspire not only Tsar Alexander II’s far-reaching reforms of the Russian government and society, but also his alliance a few years later with President Abraham Lincoln’s United States, against the British, during the U.S. Civil War.
