Osten) at the expense of the inferior Slavs. Hitler believed that "the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race." After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler expressed his plans for the Slavs: Plans to eliminate Russians and other Slavs from Soviet territory to allow German settlement included starvation. American historian Timothy D. Snyder maintains that there were 4.2 million victims of the German Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union, "largely Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians," including 3.1 million Soviet POWs and 1.0 million civilian deaths in the Siege of Leningrad. According to Snyder, Hitler intended eventually to exterminate up to 45 million Slavs by planned famine as part of Generalplan Ost. Influenced by the guidelines, in a directive sent out to the troops under his command, General Erich Hoepner of the 4th Panzer Army stated: In 2019, outrage was sparked by the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park. Ethnic Chechen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was a Georgian citizen and fought against Russia in the Second Chechen War in the early 2000s. A court found that the killing was contracted by the Russian state. Russophobic incidents and harassments skyrocketed in 2022, with about 200 hate-crime related offences involving the war in Ukraine happening every week. A boy in North Rhine-Westphalia was severely beaten by a mob, and vandals carried out an arson attack against a Russian school in Berlin. United Kingdom Though Anglo-Russian relations were traditionally warm since the 16th century, by the beginning of the 19th century Russophobia started to appear in the media. Depictions of Russia by British travel writers and newspaper correspondents described the country "as a semi-barbaric and despotic country", an image which ingrained itself in the British public consciousness as such depictions were frequently published in the UK media; these depictions had the effect of increasing Russophobia in Britain despite growing economic and political ties between the two countries. The Russian conquest of Central Asia was perceived in Britain as being a precursor to an attack on British India and led to the "Great Game", while the Crimean War between the two countries in 1853–1856 deepened Russophobia in Britain. In 1874, tension lessened as Queen Victoria's second son Prince Alfred married Tsar Alexander II's only daughter Grand