What lies beneath their glacial smiles? Fear?Kremlin.ru

“I’m sorry, I don’t have my passport. I left it at my house,” I stuttered in highly anglicised Russian, only to be greeted by a stern-faced police officer in a St Petersburg Metro station. “My house is on Vasilyevsky Island. I’m a student, from England.”

Upon hearing these last two words, the Politsiya man’s shoulders relaxed and he waved me through the barrier, leaving me to carry on with my journey, as I nursed a 50p cup of coffee, concentrating far less on the lack of actual coffee flavour therein than on the fact that I’d narrowly avoided being arrested by the Russians. I clearly looked foreign – or else the policeman wouldn’t have stopped me – but if he didn’t have a problem with an Englishman wandering around St Petersburg without his passport, what was he checking for? Most probably: Americans.

Due to the similarities in culture, language and our political relationship, it is easy to group the UK and the US into one beautifully convenient little group known as ‘The West’, but the Russians don’t necessarily make the same connection. From the point of view of Putin’s government and the media, it was the US who glared intensely at them, hovering their finger over the big red button, during the Cold War, and it is the US who have refrozen the thawing relationship now by getting involved in Syria.

Russian newspapers feature headlines such as “The C-400 will leave the Americans behind”, and “The CIA has declared cyberwar on Russia. What next?”. These offer a snapshot of Russia’s view of the US, but such antagonism towards the UK is far less prevalent.

This outlook is not only found in the media, but also in Putin's words. Speaking at the International Economic Forum in St Petersburg earlier this year, the Russian President said that, when the US withdrew from their Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty back in 2002, after it had been in force for 30 years, they “delivered a colossal blow to the entire system of international security”.

It was surprising to me to hear such powerful words spoken against the US, a country which is rarely painted as posing a risk to international security by UK parliamentary leaders. Far more common is for British politicians and journalists to demonise Russia, with headlines such as “Putin shows who is boss in Crimea” and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s recent comments in the House of Commons, suggesting that the Russians should come before the International Criminal Court.

To provide some context for Johnson’s speech, a UN convoy was recently destroyed in Syria, en route to providing humanitarian aid. Johnson says that although they deny it, all evidence points to Russian responsibility. He insisted, however, that his words weren’t said “out of any hostility to Russia” – a claim that seems incongruous, given that he outright blamed the country for the attack. Russia have picked up on this, with Putin calling the comments “a storm in a teacup of muddy London water”.

The Americans are no less antagonistic. Amid allegations that the Russians have been hacking into private US documents, the CIA have been told to draw up plans. Obama, Biden, and Clinton are all behind this. The latter has called Russia’s hacks “a direct assault on our democracy”. The only prominent figure in American politics who does not condemn Russia is, of course, Donald Trump. When asked about who hacked the US system, he responded: “It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people.”

The reactionary comments seem to conceal the real feeling between the West and Russia: fear. It’s an emotion that seems weak and so nobody wants to display it, but it underlies everything that Vladimir Putin said in his Economic Forum speech. When he discussed America’s decision to put nuclear warheads in Romania, he was clearly worried about proximity. And Boris Johnson, for his part, desperately tried to backtrack on his statements, scared of how Russia might react.

Spokespeople for both Russia and the West are making no effort to appease the other side, but are very quick to take offence at anything said against them, reducing the serious issues of the US, Europe and Russia waging war upon the battleground of Syria to childish name-calling. However, this bleak view of the relationship between Russia and the West is often misconstrued as being upheld by every single citizen – a notion which seems so ridiculous when written in print that it’s hard to believe it is so often thought to be true, although perhaps only subconsciously.

My encounter with the police proves this, and the fact that I and several other students were welcomed into Russian people’s homes, given food and treated patiently when making feeble attempts at Russian conversation does too. The media would have us believe that Russia and the West are constantly at each other’s throats, but the real truth is that only the governments are in disharmony. And even then, it’s really about fear