Netflix show The Americans was about Soviet spies in the United States during the 1980s, living ordinary lives under “deep cover”. This wasn’t just a period piece.
As The i Paper reported on Wednesday, two suspected Russian spies managed to sneak into the UK aboard cargo ships earlier this year. And six Bulgarians living in London – including a beautician, a hospital driver, and a lab assistant – have been convicted of spying for Russian military intelligence.
However, we have not simply returned to Cold War business-as-usual. Rather, Russia has perfected “hybrid warfare”, a new kind of war, and one Britain is ill prepared to fight.
Hybrid warfare combines military and non-military tools. Sophisticated adversaries don’t send missiles or tanks – at least not at first. Instead, there may be computer hacking and wholesale data theft, ransomware attacks on economic infrastructure, and disinformation campaigns during elections.
That list comes from Lucas Kello, director of the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford University. He speaks about a “zone of unpeace” where the UK and other Western governments “routinely fail to prevent strategic intrusions” by Russian hackers working for the Kremlin.
“The real vulnerability lies below the war line,” Kello told me. This is because Western governments are risk-averse and constrained by legal norms and liberal values, while their adversaries have never accepted those norms.
“The result is Western self-restraint amid growing aggression. What use is liberal virtue in an international jungle that grows more ruthless by the year?”
There are more than just cyber attacks in this grey zone. Last year, the director of MI5, Ken McCallum, said that Russian military intelligence, the GRU, was on a “sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets”.
McCallum said there had been incidents of “arson, sabotage and more”. Although he didn’t give details, there have been several well publicised incidents that back up his claims.
Last month, two British men were jailed for an arson attack on a warehouse in Leyton, east London, that was storing Starlink satellite gear for Ukraine. The men had been recruited by the Wagner Group, a mercenary and criminal organisation used by the Kremlin for black ops.
In 2024, Russian military intelligence was accused of sending firebombs to DHL logistics hubs in Birmingham and Germany. The idea was apparently to get these devices onto planes bound for the US, part of efforts to undermine Nato support for Ukraine. There was also a mysterious explosion at the Glascoed ammunition factory in South Wales, which was making shells for Ukraine.
Such attacks are to be expected while Britain supports Ukraine. But the intelligence services believe that – regardless of that support – Vladimir Putin’s goal is to find ways to weaken the West.
The Kremlin – rightly – sees our economies as our primary source of strength. The aim is to damage these, mainly through cyber attacks against some of Europe’s most successful companies. This is Russia’s doctrine of strategic relativism: if we cannot be strong, we will make you weak.
Bob Seely, a former Army intelligence officer and ex-Tory M who has written a book, The New Total War, about Russia’s hybrid warfare, said Moscow now views the UK as its “number-one enemy”.
This is especially true given the Kremlin has managed to get its claws into parts of the Trump administration, now noticeably less hostile to Russia than European governments. Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, has ordered US Cyber Command to halt offensive operations against Russia, and Trump has imposed no new sanctions against the Kremlin in nine months.
Seely said that MI5 understood the Russian threat and was “scaling up” to address it. Historically, the intelligence services have always paid close attention to Russia because of its nuclear weapons, but he said there had long been a “refusal and reluctance” in the rest of Whitehall to confront Moscow.
That was because of concerns about damage to the City of London, and about the loss of fat fees for lawyers from Russian oligarchs. “Londongrad” was good business.
Today, Seely thinks Whitehall simply doesn’t understand the new ways of war, and there have been only “baby steps” in dealing with the Russian threat, with politicians not explaining hybrid warfare to the public.
He sees another problem: China, and the UK Government’s refusal to define it as a threat; Britain had turned a blind eye to Chinese hacking, spying, and influence operations.
China’s ultimate aim was to accumulate enough control to cripple the West in the event of a war over Taiwan, he added. The UK and Europe would be so “beholden” to China that the transatlantic alliance would break. “And that’s the end of the West. The US is isolated by China, Europe becomes a feeble backwater, and we enter a much darker world.”
Even so, in facing an officially recognised threat from Russia – if not from China – the UK has not stood still. The National Security Act passed in 2023 makes it harder for hostile foreign intelligence agencies to operate here, and the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, launched in July, requires mandatory disclosure of any links to Russia.
Britain has also kicked out a lot of Russian “diplomats” (for which, read spies). The last GRU officer is said to have left this year. This may be why the GRU needs to smuggle in fresh operatives aboard cargo ships.
Russia may now try to find more spies online, recruiting on social media, giving orders through encrypted messaging apps and paying in cryptocurrencies.
Moscow can also resort to using criminals. MI6 chief Richard Moore said earlier this year that the Russian intelligence services had “gone a bit feral” in employing criminal gangs.
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Last year, the National Crime Agency said they had broken up a Russian operation working with British drugs gangs. The gangs would swap physical cash for Russian crypto. The British criminals got untraceable funds, the Russians got clean money, some of which went on arms to fight Ukraine.
Earlier this week, Vladimir Putin offered his customary denials about seeking a conflict with the West – he had said “a hundred times” that Russia didn’t want war with Europe, but then came the threat: “If Europe wants to fight, we’re ready. Right now.”
Such a war would not start with tanks rolling into Poland. It would be harder to detect and harder to defeat. In some ways, that battle has already begun.
