Putin ‘aims to weaken the West from within without having to fire a single shot’

The new head of MI6 will warn in her first major public speech of the growing threat of Russia, warning that the ‘front line is everywhere’.

Blaise meterweli, appointed head of MI6 in June, is expected to speak of the threat posed by an ‘aggressive, expansionist and revisionist’ Russia.

She will say: ‘Putin should be in no doubt, our support is enduring. The pressure we apply on Ukraine’s behalf will be sustained.

‘The export of chaos is a feature, not a bug, in the Russian approach to international engagement, and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus.’

The comments meterweli will make today echo those of NATO’s Mark Rutte, Samantha de Bendern, Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, told Metro.

The issue at hand is that warfare varies in definition from person to person, de Bendern adds: ‘If you speak to a military person, for them, war is kinetic warfare. Anything that does not involve people shooting at each other remains, from a person’s point of view, underneath the threshold of war.

‘That is looking at war in a way that’s very stuck in the 20th century, because what is the aim of war? To weaken your enemy. I would argue that Russian interference in Brexit has weakened the UK and the European Union. It was a perfect act of war.’

Citing recent drone incursions, sabotage attacks on railways in Poland and other eastern European countries, and cyberattacks across the continent, de Bendern is clear: these acts, which have been attributed to Russia, should be called acts of terrorism.

Yet they haven’t been designated as such, despite NATO having cyberattacks classified as an Article 5 event.

Article 5 states that all the members agree that an armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all.

If Article 5 is invoked, the members will take ‘action it deems necessary’ to ‘restore and maintain the security’ of the North Atlantic. This could, if deemed necessary, include the use of armed forces.

de Bendern argues: ‘But Russia is at war with us. We just don’t know it. I think people will only wake up to this threat when a missile falls on a European capital or European city. 

‘Russia is counting on us being the frog in boiling water. It’s counting on the fact that it will make us get used to having airports closed because drones are flying over them.

‘We’ve had Russia use chemical warfare on British soil with Skripal Novichok. We’ve had Russia use byproducts of the military nuclear complex by using plutonium on British soil that hardly registered a blink. I think, unfortunately, it’s going to take something catastrophic on NATO soil for us to realise,’ de Bendern adds.

‘People keep saying, ‘We don’t want to send our boys to die for Ukraine, we don’t want to go to war with Russia.”

‘I agree with that. I have a son who would be old enough to go and fight. I don’t want him to go and fight for Ukraine either,’ she says.

‘But we need to understand that if Ukraine falls, we will be next. In one way or another, we will be next.’

In today’s speech, meterweli will address some of the worries raised by de Bendern and other experts, insisting the UK is already using technology to tackle threats from Russia.

‘Mastery of technology must infuse everything we do,’ meterweli will say. ‘Not just in our labs, but in the field, in our tradecraft, and even more importantly, in the mindset of every officer.

‘We must be as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple languages.’

The spy chief will also point to how her agency’s work builds on sanctions recently slapped on Russian companies and individuals by the Foreign Office.

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