Late on March 12, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official Twitter feeds began mocking the British government with tweets accusing the British of blaming Russia for everything, even the weather.

The posts followed an accusation by UK Prime Minister Theresa May on March 12 that Russia was “highly likely” to be behind the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and a number of UK bystanders, using a powerful nerve agent from the Novichok family.

The Ministry’s Russian-language feed, @mid_rf, was the first to post a video showing snow in Britain, together with the awkward caption “#HighlyLikelyRussia casted snow on Britain” and the equally awkward Cyrillic transliteration, “ХайлиЛайклиРаша.”

Translated from Russian: “Sincere words of thanks to Mrs. May for #HighlyLikelyRussia. It’s gone to the people. And here’s the first news for ‘HailiLaikliRasha.’” Archived on March 13, 2018. (Source: Twitter / @MID_RF)

Half an hour later, the Ministry’s English-language feed followed suit.

Archived on March 13, 2018. (Source: Twitter / @mfa_russia)

The two posts continued a pattern of defensive comments from Russian officials and media, which, as @DFRLab has already reported, follow the pattern of “dismiss, distort, distract, dismay.”

The mocking tone matched the comment by Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova that Prime Minister May’s statement to the UK Parliament was a “circus show,” and the claim by state television anchor Dmitry Kiselev that the British accusation was done “simply to feed their Russophobia.”

(Source: Twitter / Steve Rosenberg)

The intention seems to have been to create a viral hashtag, but by 13:30 UTC on March 13—some fourteen hours after the initial English-language post — the hashtag had only generated under 1,000 tweets.

By that point, the Foreign Ministry’s Russian-language feed, which has 1.23 million followers, registered just 109 retweets of its post. The English-language feed, with 174,000 followers, had 122 retweets, although the video was marked as scoring almost 35,000 views.