Former Russian president predicts united Ireland for 2023

The prediction came from the social media account of Dmitry Medvedev, who served as placeholder president in 2008-2012 when Vladimir Putin had to shift into the prime minister’s post because of term limits.

Mr Medvedev - who is currently deputy head of Russia’s Security Council – made a series of bold predictions as part of a Twitter thread ahead of the new year.

Alongside claiming the UK would rejoin the European Union, Medvedev said: “Northern Ireland will separate from the UK and join the Republic of Ireland.”

The Putin ally has often been critical of the western world following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine back in February, earlier this year accusing the US and its allies of trying to engineer Russia’s break-up.

Beginning his Twitter predictions, Medvedev said: “On the New Year’s Eve, everybody’s into making predictions.

“Many come up with futuristic hypotheses, as if competing to single out the wildest, and even the most absurd ones.

“Here’s our humble contribution.”

Predictions by the Russian official included the suggestion of rising oil prices, that the EU will collapse when the UK rejoins the trading bloc and that Poland and Hungary would “occupy western regions of the formerly existing Ukraine”.

Finishing the thread he wrote: “Season greetings to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and their happily oinking piglets.”

Back in September Mr Medvedev suggested the United States of America and other countries in the West were trying to provoke Russia’s break-up and warned that such attempts could lead to doomsday.

He warned that an attempt to push Russia towards collapse would amount to a “chess game with death”.

He alleged that some in the West would like to “take advantage of the military conflict in Ukraine to push our country to a new twist of disintegration, do everything to paralyse Russia’s state institutions and deprive the country of efficient controls, as happened in 1991”.

Writing a post on his messaging app channel after attending a memorial service to the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, Medvedev wrote: “Those are the dirty dreams of the Anglo-Saxon perverts, who go to sleep with a secret thought about the break-up of our state, thinking about how to shred us into pieces, cut us into small bits.

“Such attempts are very dangerous and mustn’t be underestimated. Those dreamers ignore a simple axiom: a forceful disintegration of a nuclear power is always a chess game with death, in which it’s known precisely when the check and mate comes: doomsday for mankind.”

Mr Medvedev concluded by saying that Russia’s nuclear arsenals are “the best guarantee of safeguarding the Great Russia”.