From the outset of the Ukraine war, Skidelsky took every opportunity to puncture the Russophobic stereotypes of Russian expansionism, aggression and authoritarianism used to justify the Western proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Geoffrey Roberts is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy; University College Cork, Ireland Emeritus Professor of History
Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Great Britain has a long and honourable tradition of radical domestic dissent from the country’s foreign policy. It was British humanitarians who initiated the campaign against the slave trade in the 18th century. In the 19th century, British radicals opposed the expansion of the British empire. During the First World War, British pacifists were imprisoned for opposing mass slaughter. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill rejected Western appeasement of Hitler and campaigned for an Anglo-Soviet alliance against Hitler. During the cold war, British peace campaigners petitioned and marched for the prohibition of nuclear weapons. In the early 2000s one the biggest protest movements in history opposed Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war.
As recent protests against the Gaza and Iran wars show, that dissenting tradition is alive and well.
However, in relation to Britain’s proxy war in Ukraine, dissent has been somewhat stifled by the overwhelming weight of the Russophobia promoted by mainstream media and politicians. Resisting this barrage of Western propaganda has been a small but voluble – and not uninfluential – band of academics, analysists, journalists, bloggers and activists who have presented alternative views of Putin’s Russia and the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Lord Robert Skidelsky – who died in April 2026 – was one of the most important of these dissident voices. Indeed, in the mainstream of British politics he was virtually the only major dissenter. Without Skidelsky, there would have been no mainstream political challenge to the Russophobic consensus.
Skidelsky was a famous historian and biographer and a member of the British Parliament’s House of Lords. From the outset of the Ukraine war, he took every opportunity to puncture the Russophobic stereotypes of Russian expansionism, aggression and authoritarianism used to justify the Western proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Though ignored and marginalised by mainstream media, Skidelsky made himself heard – through articles, letters, interviews, debates and, uniquely, speeches in parliament.
When the House of Lords debated the massive rearmament and militarisation proposed by Britain’s Strategic Defence Review in June 2025, Skidelsky was a lone critic, arguing that
‘The Review is a superb example of how, starting from a false premise, remorseless logic can lead to madness. The premise is that if Russia is not confronted by a rearmed Europe, it will seek to impose its will on the Continent. Deny the premise and the argument for mobilising society and economy against Russia collapses. What it reveals is the strength of the warmongering mood of official Britain.’
As the biographer of the premier economist John Maynard Keynes, Skidelsky also had a lot to say about so-called ‘military Keynesianism’ – arms expenditure as a means of propping up the general economy. As Skidelsky pointed out, the idea that arms spending is a good investment is bad politics as well as economics:
‘Once a society accepts that war preparation must be its organising principle, argued Skidelsky, it will begin to see threats everywhere. It will devise an ideology of vigilance, cultivate a rhetoric of existential menace, and treat dissent as a species of irresponsibility.’
As Skidelsky himself observed, apart from Poland and the Baltics, no country’s Russophobia has been more belligerent than Great Britain’s.
For Skidelsky, Russophobia was a form of political paranoia – ‘the mental delusion that one is being threatened, persecuted or targeted, based on consistent misinterpretation of others’ actions as hostile or malicious’.
But Skidelsky’s explanation for the virulent character of British Russophobia was more historical and political than psychological.
Russophobia emerged in 19th century Britain as a response to Russia’s growing power internationally and perceived threats to British imperial interests, especially in Central Asia. There was also a belief that compared to liberal regimes like Britain, autocracies like Russia were inherently aggressive and expansionist. This liberal superiority complex was compounded by the conviction that British imperialism was more ‘civilised’ than Russian imperialism. Skidelsky also noted that in the 19th century Russophobia was fanned by the anti-Tsarist lobbying of Hungarian and Polish exiles in London. In the early 20th century, Russophobia was superseded by Germanophobia, but returned with a vengeance in the form of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Sovietism.
But the history of British Russophobia was not black and white. According to Skidelsky:
“The 19th-century record also shows that Russophobia was recurrent rather than continuous, with intense bouts of moral outrage interrupted by functional alliances and compromises…British Russophobia is not an unbroken constant but a durable repertoire of ideas and images that politicians, soldiers, and journalists repeatedly invoke when three conditions align: ideological incompatibility, imperial or security friction, and domestic political utility.”
Because of his staunch opposition to Western propaganda about the Ukraine, Skidelsky was depicted by his opponents as pro-Russia and pro-Putin.
Certainly, Skidelsky was a friend of Russia, someone who favoured the closest possible Anglo-Russian relationship. Himself of Russian-Jewish heritage, he established a society to foster Anglo-Russian understanding. He attended meetings of the Valdai Club and served as an non-executive director of the Russian oil company, Rosneft. He compared President Vladimir Putin to General de Gaulle, not Adolf Hitler. On the eve of the launch of the Special Military Operation in February 2022 he called for a wide-ranging security pact between Russia and the West.
But Skidelsky was not an uncritical friend of Russia’s.
Skidelsky agreed that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine but didn’t consider the provocation sufficient to warrant the launch of the Special Military Operation. He saw a dire NATO-Ukraine threat to Russian security as emergent not imminent. He thought there were better ways for Russia to detach Ukraine from the West, including through diplomacy.
While Skidelsky opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he blamed Western intervention in the war for turning what could have been a limited, localised conflict into an epic existential struggle that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and all-but destroyed Ukraine.
Skidelsky was a consistent and insistent advocate of a compromise peace between Russia and Ukraine and of a wide-ranging security agreement between Russia and NATO. His advocacy of peace was moral as well as political. He opposed ‘perpetual wars’, supposedly necessary for ‘perpetual peace’ and preferred what he called ‘the morality of reconciliation’ to ‘the morality of outrage’.
To the end of his life, Skidelsky remained optimistic that the Ukraine war could be ended by a negotiated peace settlement.
In the eyes of ultra-patriots, the greatest sin in wartime is trying to be objective.
‘The problem we have in making peace’ argued Skidelsky , ‘lies in the difficulty of escaping from narratives etched deep in national psyches. The solution to the disorder inherent in a world of sovereign nations is not that they should arms themselves to the teeth, but that they should develop rules of coexistence, and practice the arts of diplomacy and conflict resolution’
In trying to be objective, in lending his prestige and eloquence to the struggle against Russophobia, Lord Robert Skidelsky made a singular and irreplaceable contribution to the cause of peace.
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