Forget the Crimea and the cold war: Anglo-Russian relations have never been so awkward. Moscow resents us giving a home to opponents of Vladimir Putin such as the oligarch Boris Berezovsky and the Chechen separatist Akhmed Zakayev. We’d like the extradition of the agent suspected of sprinkling radioactive polonium210 in London restaurants and hotels. We expel Russian diplomats, and the Russians make life hell for British Council staff. There’s a permanent threat that Russia may one day cut off our gas supply Now a 23-year-old Russian author, based in London, has piled in with rude observations about Britain. In her book, The UK for Beginners, Olga Freer claims Britons scratch their bottoms in public, don’t iron their clothes and are obsessed with television programmes about buying and selling houses.

The book is not yet published in English, but following an interview with an English-language newspaper in Russia, her opinions have reached an unimpressed British public. Freer looks shocked by the reaction – much as one of her oligarch compatriots might have looked on discovering that HM Revenue and Customs had scent of his offshore loot.

“It’s only a novel,” she insists. But as she says herself, it came about as a result of friends and family reading the letters and e-mails she sent from London. In any case, she repeats several of her ungracious observations while The Sunday Times marches her around London’s brightest tourist spots, desperate to show her how marvellous Britain really is.

Alas, at Buckingham Palace, Freer declares the architecture “uninteresting”. In Parliament Square, as we watch Plane Stupid activists unroll a banner from the roof of parliament, she says pointedly that protest in Red Square is permitted even without prior permission (a dig at Tony Blair’s antiterror laws).

Our conversation ranges round binge drinking and the National Health Service and the national plague – obesity. “It’s not something I made up. Britons are fatter than the citizens of any other European country,” she declares. “There are large women here who wear mini-skirts and go out and get drunk and jump out of their clothes. Maybe they are happy with themselves.

“But an English guy told me he was surprised how many chubby English girls think they are stunning when they are not. He didn’t say chubby – he said fat, but I’m trying to make it nicer. Russians have a more severe view of being fat. If you are fat, you will be bullied. Here, you are quite tolerant.”

Freer says she recently contracted chicken pox, and after battling to secure a doctor’s appointment, was prescribed paracetamol: “That is not the way to treat the condition. In Russia, they would put you in hospital for two weeks.”

From her close reading of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, she has learnt that British hospitals in the second world war were well scrubbed. “But now they are all dirty. Where did it go wrong?” She concludes that all great civilisations must eventually decline.

Her most surprising assertion is that binge drinking is worse in Britain than in Russia. I didn’t think it was possible – but you live and learn. And her outrage reaches a peak when I ask about culture.

“In the UK, the only thing anybody talks about is football. In Russia, you can get in a taxi and talk to the driver about literature.

“If you go to a Russian house, everybody has books. But here!” (She’s had the misfortune to enter homes with no books at all.) “Isn’t it horrible! It’s disgusting.” (If this seems a bit strong, remember that Freer is an author.) “I feel pity for these people who do not read. They are miserable. They are in the dark.”

And in a similar vein: “You go to the theatre here, and it’s all tourists.” In Russia, by contrast, absolutely everybody is constantly queuing outside theatres.

As for education: “What you learn at university, a Russian would have learnt at school.” Ouch.

In Freer’s defence, it’s hard to tell how much of what she says is serious. But I believe her when she protests: “I do love it here – or I would not still be here!” Since arriving in 2002, she has worked as a shop assistant and waitress and is now studying law.

She’s reticent about her marital status, refusing to confirm or deny that she’s divorced – but admits to having a three-year-old son, Liam. Like him, she enjoys British citizenship, having qualified for it early last year. Why did she bother? “For a start, because I pay the tax and I have a right to apply. And the passport is useful when you travel around the world.”

One thing she approves of is our friendliness. “When you go out in Russia with your friends, you stay with them. Here, you mix with other people.”

Better still, she says: “You can go out at night and you don’t need to be afraid.” Really? But weren’t the papers full of stories this past week about a man who murdered young women? “In Russia, the papers don’t print stories about young women being killed at night because it happens every day. If you think London is dangerous, you should go to Russia for a while.”

For similar reasons, she prefers not to discuss topics such as the political asylum in London of the oligarch Berezovsky. Indeed, she fears she might be assassinated.

How was she going to vote in today’s Russian elections? “We are told who to vote for, so we must vote for him,” she says. “Everyone knows who is going to be the next president. It has been chosen for us already.”

But, still, she would not care to grow old here. With very rare exceptions, Russians look after their elderly relatives: “Sometimes on Russian TV, you have a programme about an old woman whose daughter doesn’t want her. Here, that’s an ordinary part of everyday life.”

Her comments have gone down badly because: “It’s as if you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and see that you don’t look so good – you decide not to go out that day. You don’t hate yourself for that, but if you had gone out and somebody told you that you didn’t look so good, you would hate them.”

As a description of how rudeness works, this can’t be faulted. But is it enough to persuade us to welcome this latest outbreak of Russian hostility?

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