Russian Embassy’s comment on Malcolm Rifkind’s piece in The Times of 14 August 2017

We are not surprised by the former tory foreign and defense secretary’s attempt at finding some common ground between a post-Brexit Britain and the EU. But why at Russia’s expense?! Napoleon’s "nation of shopkeepers" and charges of "bloodymindedness" had nothing to do with Russia. And if all of history is taken into account, one could conclude that it was Russia’s participation in settlement of European quarrels, like two world wars, that ensured the right outcomes. WWI was a common failure of all European powers, with Russia the least interested party having suffered the most. As to WWII, it seems the West cannot disown Nazism enough.

Why these stark predictions about Russia? After all, our participation in reaching a nuclear deal with Iran was decisive and even the Obama Administration acknowledged that. We don’t mind Britain’s naval power, including the two new aircraft carriers. All of us have tried, with differing degrees of success and rationale, a "diplomacy backed by force or credible threat of force" (the authorship belongs to the collective West). But the key problem of European politics is not military, it is political. And first of all it’s about political elites’ alternative to domestic status quo.
In the absence of a positive agenda domestically and internationally, Sir Malcolm’s fearmongering reminds us the Cold War classic of "keeping Germany down, US in and Russia out", i.e. a permanently divided Europe. Looks like a tested bubble to shift the political, intellectual and moral blame for everything that has gone wrong in the West over past decades. Will, indeed, Britain be able to stay in Europe on that shaky conceptual foundation?