Russia withdraws from 1956 fishing deal with Britain

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered the most serious confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and each side casts the other as a perfidious enemy. The May 1956 fishing deal was signed in London at a turning point in the Cold War: Khrushchev had that year denounced Josef Stalin, proposed peaceful co-existence with the West and even visited Britain in April.

Russia is withdrawing from a 1956 fishing deal struck with Britain by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, an indicator of just how deep the gulf between Russia and the West has become after two years of conflict and Cold War rhetoric. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered the most serious confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and each side casts the other as a perfidious enemy.

The May 1956 fishing deal was signed in London at a turning point in the Cold War: Khrushchev had that year denounced Josef Stalin, proposed peaceful co-existence with the West and even visited Britain in April. Today, the view from Moscow is harsher.

President Vladimir Putin casts the United States and its allies as a crumbling empire that wants to destroy Russia and steal its natural resources. The West casts Putin as a killer and Putin's Russia as an enemy. The 1956 fishing deal allowed British vessels into the rich fishing grounds of the Barents Sea, the coast of the Kola Peninsula and along the coast of Kolguyev Island.

"When Nikita Khrushchev accepted this deal in 1956, it is difficult to say what guided him but it was definitely not national interest," Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma lower house of parliament, said in a statement. "The British need to study some proverbs: 'Russians harness the horse slowly, but ride it fast'."

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the West slapped what it cast as the toughest sanctions ever imposed on a major economy. Russia cast the sanctions as a declaration of economic war, though its economy grew 3.6% last year. Britain on Wednesday imposed sanctions on six individuals in charge of the Arctic penal colony where Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died last week.

"When people ask if we can respond to sanctions, the answer is: we can," Volodin said, adding that British vessels caught thousands of tonnes of cod and haddock in Russian waters. Volodin, a close ally of Putin, repeated the current orthodoxy of the Kremlin which views the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and Mikhail Gorbachev as a failure who was tricked by an deceitful West intent on humiliating Russia.

"With Gorbachev, we lost our country, and with Putin we got it back," Volodin said.