Britain might already be at war with Russia, a former MI5 chief has warned, pointing to the rising number of cyberattacks as well as sabotage and covert operations on UK soil.
Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was head of the security service between 2002 and 2007, said Moscow could be waging a different kind of conflict against the West, echoing comments from foreign policy expert Fiona Hill.
The warning comes as concern over âhybrid warfareâ tactics â a combination of cyberwar operations, disinformation and targeted violence â grows in Westminster.
Ms Manningham-Buller told the Lord Speakerâs Corner podcast: âFiona Hill may be right in saying weâre already at war with Russia. Itâs a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyberattacks, the physical attacks, intelligence work is extensive.â
Ms Manningham-Buller, who worked in MI5 for more than three decades, remembered meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2005 at a time when the UK was attempting to bring Moscow into the fold of international cooperation.
Speaking with Lord McFall of Alcluith, the Lord Speaker, she said: âWe all hoped that at the end of the Soviet Union we would have a potential partner. That was one of the reasons why Putin was with us for the G8 summit in 2005. I met him when he came back to London.
âBut actually we were wrong, because Russia is extremely hostile to the West. I didnât anticipate that within a year heâd be ordering the murder on London streets of Alexander Litvinenko.â
In 2006, Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent for the KGB and its post-Soviet successor agency, the FSB, became violently ill in London after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210. He died three weeks later.
A British inquiry found that Russian agents had killed Mr Litvinenko, probably with Mr Putinâs approval, but the Kremlin denied any involvement.
Ms Manningham-Buller said Moscowâs actions since it launched its war against Ukraine in 2022 have highlighted how the Kremlin had already committed to a period of prolonged hostility against the West, citing examples of âsabotage, intelligence collection, attacking peopleâ in Britain.
She also described Ms Hill, who is a biographer of the Russian president, co-author of Sir Keir Starmerâs 2025 strategic defence review and a former adviser to US president Donald Trump, as âprobably the person who knows more about Putin than anybody elseâ.
Speaking to The Guardian in the summer, Ms Hill warned that the UK is already at war with Russia. âWeâre in pretty big trouble,â she said, describing Britainâs geopolitical situation as stuck between âthe rockâ of Mr Putinâs Russia and âthe hard placeâ of Mr Trumpâs increasingly unreliable US.
