The British brutally mocked the anthem of Russia. Retribution for rudeness came instantly

Euro 2016 was remembered by the Russians not only with the notorious departure of our team. One of the most high-profile events of this tournament was the massacre in Marseille – even the president of the Russian Federation had to speak on this matter. Mass fighting between Russian and English fans, however, overshadowed another unfortunate incident that happened on the same day as the match.

The British staged a real provocation in the stands of the Velodrome, where their team met the Russian. The punishment for rudeness awaited the fans after the match…

mockery of the anthem

The unrest in Marseille, as you know, began even before the match between Russia and England. The French police controlled the situation only conditionally, trying not to interfere in the fights of the fans, but with each passing hour it became more and more difficult for the gendarmes to maintain neutrality. The British staged real provocations: they mocked Russian national symbols, harassed Russian women and shouted dirty insults. Naturally, our fans gave the rude – and often very harsh – refusal.

– The mentality of the British is to behave like a decent employee at home, and then leave your wife for football, write around you in the streets, scatter rubbish around you and think that this will do no harm to others. And in the mentality of a Russian person, despite the fact that we are Orthodox, there is nothing that we tolerate such behavior around us. We are responding, – the journalist Anton Dorofeev told about what was happening.

Soon the flared up conflict was transferred to the Velodrome. The game itself turned out to be not too eventful, but this did not stop her from going down in history. The Russians in the first match unexpectedly took away points from the favorites not only of the group, but of the whole tournament, pulling out an equalizer in the last minutes – all thanks to the goal of Vasily Berezutsky (1:1).

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Much more fighting could be observed in the Marseille stands at that time. A series of skirmishes was preceded by another rough action by England fans. During the pre-match welcoming ceremony, the fans harshly booed the Russian anthem – it was almost impossible to listen to Alexandrov’s music due to the hum.

Naturally, this trick did not remain unanswered by the Russians. During the match, our fans broke into the opponents’ area and soon made them regret what they had done. However, there was nothing to be proud of. Our compatriots obviously went too far – some of their rivals needed to be hospitalized after the fight.

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Marseille massacre

But the real carnage, as it turned out, was yet to come. Retribution for arrogance came for the English after the match, when a group of Russian fans – 150 to 300 people according to various sources – assaulted their own offenders on the city streets. The number of the English crowd was estimated by much higher sources – at several thousand, which even Vladimir Putin was surprised later.

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The British media reacted unequivocally to the scandal: Russian fans in their materials seemed to be outright evil, while the British were just peaceful spectators. It even got to the point that they began to blame the mass brawl … on the Russian government. The Kremlin allegedly organized a gang of fans in advance, who underwent special training for the trip to Marseille, and the country’s president personally sanctioned the brawl at the Euro. Fortunately, this dubious point of view has not spread.

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Firewood, however, Russian fans broke a lot during that fight. Some fans were urgently deported, others were sent to prison. But if most of the guilty received relatively short sentences – from one to two years in prison, then Mikhail Ivkin and Pavel Kosov were much less lucky: the court gave them three and ten years in prison, respectively. The latter remains in prison to this day.