Twitter diplomacy: how Russian embassy trolls UK government

When Theresa May stood up in parliament on Wednesday and said that the Russian reaction to the use of a nerve agent on British soil had been “sarcasm, contempt, and defiance” she must in part have been referring to the social media output of Russia’s UK embassy since the news broke of Sergei Skripal’s poisoning.

While the embassy’s official response has been terse and sober – a 57-word statement that describes the UK’s diplomatic expulsions as a “hostile action” that is “totally unacceptable, unjustified and shortsighted” – its Twitter activity has been anything but restrained; instead it has frequently goaded May’s government.

On Wednesday night, following the announcement of the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats described as “undeclared intelligence officers” by May, the embassy tweeted an image of a thermometer. Describing the temperature of relations between the two countries as dropping to -23C. The tweet finished “but we are not afraid of cold weather”.

It was the latest in a series of tweets the embassy has posted to fight the Russian corner in the dispute over the poisoning. On 13 March a series of tweets suggested that the UK was guilty of provocation over the Salisbury incident, implied that the government were spreading fake news, and threatened “equal and opposite” Russian retaliation to any sanctions imposed by the UK.

The tactic can be very effective. Most of the tweets the Russians have published during the Skripal affair have been getting around 200 retweets. The temperature drop tweet, however, was shared nearly a thousand times. The oddball approach to diplomacy gets the Russian message spread further.

It makes a sharp contrast with the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office approach to the same issue. The UK government has been putting their view across with slickly produced but very formal animations.

The Russian embassy has also been active on social media in rejecting the label “Russian spy” that has frequently been applied to Sergei Skripal in the British media, tweeting that “by calling a MI6 agent ‘Russian’ media sets an agenda for public opinion and investigation”.

As the best known face of British intelligence services, the Russians even threw a James Bond joke into their attempts to push this line.

The Skripal poisoning has brought the communications from the Russian embassy into sharp relief, but this has been a continuation of a social media tactic that the Russians have been using for some time, especially around accusations that Russia has been meddling in US and European elections and referendums.

The topic was used for a joke suggesting British weather was interfering in Russian democracy.

The embassy also frequently uses social media to take issue with British media reporting of Russia, especially on Russian involvement in Syria. But it also occasionally reacts to things as trivial as an unfavourable film review.

The mix of humour and political sarcasm has worked well in driving a social media following. With more than 67,000 Twitter followers, @RussianEmbassy has more followers than any other G20 country’s diplomatic mission to the UK. And after a recent Twitter purge of fake and “bot” accounts, the Russians were proudly boasting that at least 99.8% of their followers were genuine.

Some of the tweets have no political overtones at all, and are just outright attempts at providing topical humour.

Not, it seems, with Sergei Skripal and his daughter still in hospital, that anybody in the UK government has been laughing at the Russian embassy’s jokes this week.