Putin’s Conspiratorial Fantasies Are Blowing Back on Him

On Sept. 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin held the official signing ceremony to annex the supposed new territories of Russia that were seized from Ukraine. During his speech, he used a term that’s become a favorite pejorative among Russian nationalists. “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons,” Putin said. “They moved on to sabotage.”

Russia’s perennial paranoia about the United Kingdom has drawn plenty of attention, and Putin’s reference was part of that. Confusingly, though, the term is now most heavily used by the “Z-patriots,” the ultranationalists who both cheer the invasion of Ukraine and decry Putin’s government for prosecuting the war so ineptly.

When the Z-patriots use the term “Anglo-Saxons,” they don’t mean the United Kingdom or even—in the way that, say, French critics sometimes use it—a combination of the United Kingdom and United States. They mean the British Empire—or rather, a tangled misreading of the historical British Empire, seen as a permanent conspiracy against all things good and Russian. This vision was adopted by Putin, but now it’s been turned against him.

For 19th century Russian ultranationalists, British power could not be attributed to merely material concerns. Rather, it was, in their vision of the world, built off the back of conspiratorial power: Masons and Jews were the source of London’s creeping tentacles, which choked off patriotic Russian ambitions. Those ideas went somewhat dormant under the Soviet Union, only to return in force today.

One of the best sources for this is a recent interview on a pro-war Russian imperialist YouTube channel, Roi TV, which has nearly half a million subscribers. The host, Maxim Kalashnikov, is a self-proclaimed futurologist, writer, and big name in Z-patriot circles. His ideology consists of fever dreams about a high-tech Russian Empire built on the bones of the Soviet Union, powered by cold fusion and secret Stalinist technologies. He has spent 30 years writing books with titles such as The Broken Sword of the Empire, arguing that Russia is the only thing standing between humanity and a “Masonic-Western” dystopia.

In the episode posted on Aug. 23, 2025, he’s interviewing Yuri Yevich, the premier authority on tactical medicine in the Russian-speaking world. A veteran of several conflicts and a former surgeon, he is the founder of the “Technologies of Survival” academy, where he lectures Russian soldiers. In 2023, he famously became a martyr for the Z-patriots when he was charged with “discrediting the army” because he was too honest about the military’s medical failures. He got off easy—the courts refused to hear his case—but as was suspected at the time, it ended up being Kremlin’s test run to check the Z-patriot reaction. Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a good friend of both of these men, wasn’t as lucky and is still serving his sentence in a prison colony.

This interview between Kalashnikov and Yevich is described as a “philosophical” discussion about how to save everything that’s good in this world—at least, from a fascist Russian perspective. Who is the main villain blocking that? Unsurprisingly, it’s the Anglo-Saxons.

Yevich uses his knowledge of biology to “explain” that the Western interaction with Russia is purely predatory. He says the following: “The Anglo-Saxons are a predator-people, a parasite-people. … They study other nations like a butcher studies a cow—only to find the best place to insert the knife.”

“When a patient has gangrene,” Yevich says, adopting the pseudo-medical language of past fascists, “you don’t negotiate with the rot. … The Anglo-Saxon world is the gangrene of humanity. Our task … is not to ‘liberate’ territory, but to perform a global surgical intervention.”

The extremism becomes hysterical as Yevich proceeds exposing the “vile Anglo-Saxons” to this Z-patriot audience with absolute determination and righteousness in his voice: “In London, they are not even people in the sense we understand it. They are material carriers of a satanic program. … It is them or us. There is no middle ground in plague.”

This can be hard to understand exactly because it’s such incoherent nonsense. Take Putin’s ideologue Alexander Dugin in Carthago Delenda Est, a collection of his writings put together by Z-patriots online: “The Special Military Operation [the Russian euphemism for the invasion of Ukraine] is a war of the Land against the Sea. It is a war of the Spirit against Matter. … The West is the civilization of the Sea (Carthage). It is the civilization of money, trade, and fluidity. Russia is the civilization of Land (Rome). We are the civilization of Honor, Hierarchy, and Order. This is not a political conflict; it is a metaphysical war against the Kingdom of the Antichrist.”

For Putin, this inchoate political vision was extremely useful. A vague imaginary enemy could be blamed for every failure or frustration of the new Russian order that he was trying to build. It led to some issues; Russians, for instance, now have a hugely exaggerated opinion of the power of the British intelligence services, which are seen as constantly attempting to destroy all things good and being stopped by noble Russian agents.

It’s the classic fascist enemy, simultaneously feeble and all-powerful. In Russian propaganda, the U.K. is simultaneously weak, bankrupt, and decrepit—and secretly in control of the United States, global banking, and so forth. Ironically, Putin’s “Anglo-Saxons” are basically a mirror of conspiracy theories about Jews; it helps that those perennial villains of the conspiracy theorist’s imagination, the Rothschilds, are both British and Jewish.

It’s unclear how much of a true believer Putin himself is. Putin may have approached this purely cynically, with the eye of an experienced manipulator for a convenient enemy. But the problem with whipping up this kind of frenzy is that it can turn back on its creator.

People such as Yevich, who genuinely believe the propaganda, are becoming a danger to Putin himself. If your enemy is the incarnation of global evil, a malicious empire that has been threatening holy Russia for centuries, then the negotiations, compromises, and budget restraints of Putin’s war don’t make sense.

In the Z-patriots’ view of the world, then, the empire has done the unthinkable—it’s corrupted Putin himself, or at least the men around him, striking a heavy blow to their beliefs about the age-old “good tsar” myth. The conspiracy goes so deep that it’s rotted out Moscow.

With this, the social contract that kept all these violent radicals on Putin’s side is breaking. These angry patriots provided the ideological zealotry, the muscle to intimidate the opposition, and—of late—raw manpower for the meat grinder. Putin fed them dreams and promises about the “Third Rome” and restoration of imperial glory.

Now, when the dreams of taking Kyiv in three days are long gone and the Russian internet is full of scatological jokes about how in Russia “red lines” often turn to “brown lines,” the Z-patriots have become furious, desperate, and disillusioned. The belief that a new “time of troubles”—an infamous period of crisis from 1598-1613—is coming for Russia in the near future has moved from the impossible to near-mainstream status by now.

One more significant blow could be enough: another major military defeat; a “dishonorable backroom deal,” as any negotiated peace with Ukraine is called in the Z-circles; or when the economy finally implodes—and it won’t be the exiled liberal opposition, organizing anti-war mass protests, that Putin will be facing.

Instead, it will be these true believers, angry and armed—and they are already preparing, being trained by men such as Yevich. They won’t be there to overthrow anything. They will be there to purify and purge—to save their glorious empire and remove an imposter from the throne.