Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Britain should no longer be called Great Britain, arguing that it is the only country that officially refers to itself as “great”.
“I think that Britain should be called simply Britain because ‘Great Britain’ is the only example of a country that calls itself ‘Great’,” Lavrov told reporters while speaking about colonialism, following comments related to Greenland.
After the remark, his spokeswoman invited a question from Sky News correspondent Ivor Bennett, prompting Lavrov to add, “No offence.”
Lavrov said the only other example he could recall of a country using “great” in its official name was the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya under Muammar Gaddafi. He added that the state no longer exists.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is commonly referred to in Russian as Velikobritaniya, which translates to Great Britain.
Lavrov’s comments came amid heightened tensions between Moscow and London. Britain has been designated by Russia as its primary public enemy, even as the United States under President Donald Trump seeks to reset relations with Moscow and broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.
On Russian state television, Britain is frequently described as “Perfidious Albion” and portrayed as a scheming intelligence power accused of meddling globally, from Washington to Iran, in ways that undermine Russian interests.
Britain, for its part, has described Russia as a threat to Europe. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia and Western countries have repeatedly accused each other of conducting espionage campaigns at levels not seen since the Cold War.