War rhetoric from the UK and its Western European allies has reached a fever pitch, with British elites warning of an imminent clash with Russia and blaming Iran for a bizarre plot uncovered at a US airbase. With no letup in sight, RT is tracking the escalation and debunking the psyops in real time.
In the space of a single week, retired British generals told the BBC that the public must be “psychologically prepared” for conflict with Russia, a Labour Party thought leader suggested that dissidents and Russia sympathizers be “locked up,” and former Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg told British men and women that they “may have to die” in a cataclysmic European war.
This was a marked shift in rhetoric from the British elite. Since 2022, five successive prime ministers have insisted that the UK will arm Ukraine “for as long as it takes” to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, but only a handful of bellicose generals and analysts have predicted an imminent military clash with Moscow. The tactical situation has not changed, and Russia has repeatedly insisted it has no interest in a wider conflict with NATO, but talking heads from both the Labour and Conservative parties are now speaking of war as a done deal.
Meanwhile, Sky News ran ‘The Wargame’ all week – a bizarre five-episode reality show in which real politicians and military chiefs gamed out a hypothetical Russian invasion for the cameras.
With the threat from Russia rising in the real world, a new series from Sky brings together former ministers and military chiefs to test what might happen if the UK faced an attack.
Watch the new TV Show ‘Wargame’ on Sky and NOW from 21 September pic.twitter.com/b9RcuqLHwF
— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 19, 2026
On the continent, Spain’s El Mundo claimed that the CIA had learned of a potential Russian plan to launch drones at France, Italy, or Spain from ships in the Mediterranean. The claim, attributed to Lithuanian intelligence, was quickly shot down by Paris and Rome, as Finnish President Alexander Stubb appealed for calm across the West.
Stubb’s call has apparently fallen on deaf ears in the UK, where Foreign Secretary Ed Milliband described a baffling bomb plot at a US airbase on Monday as an example of “the threats our country faces,” before declaring that the British people must “fight for our values” – without saying against whom or what those values are.
The stakes – and the likelihood of miscalculation – are high. RT is watching and listening, and debunking the most outrageous war propaganda in real time.
