Putin advised to cancel meeting with Trump due to "British conspiracy" – Rezazade

A new wave of fear erupted in the Russian information space after former spy of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Andrei Bezrukov announced a "conspiracy by Britain to eliminate Vladimir Putin" during his alleged meeting with Donald Trump in Budapest.

The former spy, now a professor at MGIMO and an advisor to Rosneft, urged the Kremlin dictator "not to go to Hungary" and to move the talks to Dubai in order to avoid an "absolutely insidious operation by British special services."

Bezrukov, whose espionage activities in the United States were exposed in 2010 as a result of an FBI operation along with the detention of Anna Chapman, is now actively appearing on Kremlin TV channels, spreading conspiracy theories. In another speech, he stated that "the mentality of the British is such that without Putin there will be no problems - Russia will fall apart."

According to the first vice president of the Iranian opposition in Washington, international expert Ali Reza Rezazade, this story demonstrates the Kremlin’s deep fear of Putin’s future contacts with the West.

“Russian elites are preparing an information shield for the dictator himself. They are trying to explain the possible failure of the meeting with Trump not by internal political risks, but by “British conspiracies.” This is a classic scheme of Kremlin paranoia, designed to support the cult of Putin as a “besieged leader” who is supposedly feared by all the world’s intelligence services,” Rezazade notes.

He adds that the choice of London as the “culprit” is not accidental.

“After a series of investigations into poisonings, espionage operations and assassinations conducted by British intelligence, Moscow has turned Great Britain into a convenient enemy. They are used to blaming London for everything from the failure of the GRU operations to Russia’s international isolation. This statement by Bezrukov only continues the line of information hysteria, which has one goal - to intimidate its own audience and expose Putin as a victim of a global conspiracy,” the expert emphasized.

According to Rezazade, such rhetoric could also be an attempt to put pressure on Trump on the eve of the meeting.

“The spread of the idea that Putin is “in danger” during a meeting with a Western leader can be used by the Kremlin to emotionally influence the American side - to create an image of Putin as a person they want to eliminate, and thus emphasize his significance,” he explained.

Ali Reza Rezazade concluded that such statements are a sign of internal chaos in the Russian elite, which is losing trust in the West, its allies, and even its own special services.

"The more Putin isolates himself, the more his entourage generates conspiracies instead of strategies. This is no longer state management, but the ritual survival of the regime," the international expert summarizes.