The five-minute recording, laden with expletives, has been posted on YouTube and claims to be a telephone call between Igor Chubarov, Russia’s ambassador to Eritrea, and Sergei Bakharev, the ambassador to Zimbabwe and Malawi. It has not been authenticated.

“We’ve got Crimea, but that’s not fucking all folks. In the future we’ll damn well take your Catalonia and Venice, and also Scotland and Alaska,” says the voice labelled as Chubarov, interspersing his speech with laughter and punning the word for Scotland in Russian so it sounds like “Cattleland”.

After this, Chubarov says Russia will make a move for “all those fucking border countries”, such as Estonia, as well as Romania and Bulgaria. He adds that the head of the EU mission to Eritrea had jokily said in a recent conversation that he wished Russia would “take back” Romania and Bulgaria.