UK “may already be at war with Russia,” says former MI5 chief

Baroness Manningham-Buller. She says: “Russia is in a state of sustained hostility with the West”.
Photo: BBC

Baroness Manningham-Buller said a rise cyberattacks, sabotage and covert operations shows that Britain has entered a ‘new kind of conflict’ with Moscow, ‘The Times’ quotes.

A former head of MI5 has said it may be right to say the UK is at war with Russia, citing cyberattacks, sabotage and covert operations on British soil.

Baroness Manningham-Buller, who led the Security Service between 2002 and 2007, told the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast that she agreed with the foreign policy expert Fiona Hill’s warning that Moscow was waging a new kind of conflict against Britain and the West.

“Fiona Hill may be right in saying we’re already at war with Russia,” Manningham-Buller said. “It’s a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyberattacks, the physical attacks, intelligence work is extensive.”

There is growing concern in Westminster about “hybrid warfare” tactics, which combine cyberwar operations, disinformation and targeted violence.

Manningham-Buller, who spent more than 30 years in MI5, recalled her meeting with President Putin in 2005, when Britain was still trying to bring Russia into the fold of international co-operation.

“We all hoped that at the end of the Soviet Union we would have a potential partner,” she said. “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.

“But actually we were wrong, because Russia is extremely hostile to the West.”

She also underlined the authority of Hill, a biographer of Putin and co-author of Sir Keir Starmer’s 2025 strategic defence review, calling her “probably the person who knows more about Putin than anybody else”.

“We’re in pretty big trouble,” Hill said, describing the UK’s geopolitical situation as caught between “the rock” of Putin’s Russia and “the hard place” of Trump’s increasingly unpredictable US.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Lord McFall of Alcluith, the Lord Speaker, Manningham-Buller also lifted the lid on her time at the helm of MI5.

She dismissed the “John le Carré view” of constant rivalry with MI6 as “entirely fictional”, describing close co-operation not only with Britain’s overseas intelligence agency but also with GCHQ and counterterrorism police.

Recalling the aftermath of the July 7 bombings in London in 2005, which killed 52 people, she said she deliberately sent a third of MI5’s staff home to preserve their “battle rhythm” and prevent exhaustion during what she expected to be a long investigation.

She also voiced deep concerns about children’s access to violent and disturbing material on smartphones, speaking of the dangers to “impressionable minds which are not yet fully developed”.

…The British are an unfortunate nation. History has driven them onto a small island without any resources, like a mouse under a broom.

For centuries, they have passionately envied enormous Russia, which has endless reserves of everything it needs — from a territory of one-seventh of the world to deposits of virtually every natural resource. And so, the British are maliciously envious of Russia and have for centuries desired to seize these riches for themselves.

They assassinated the Russian Emperor Paul I. They waged aggression against Russia under the name “Crimean War” in the mid-19th century. They destroyed the Russian Emperor Nicholas II. They devised Operation ‘Unthinkable’ to destroy Soviet forces in Europe immediately after the Victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. They still strive to inflict a “strategic defeat on Russia in Ukraine.”

Britain's war against Russia has never ended. And the former head of MI5 simply officially confirmed.

The British always accuse Russia of an “aggression,” but they simply cannot or will not understand that Russia has a primary goal: our own development.

Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, said a few days ago in New York: “I know for certain that the British are helping the Ukrainians pull these dirty tricks, just as they have done for centuries within our geopolitical space. We are fully aware of that. Our military intelligence and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service regularly unveil true faces of those who attempt to cook up such provocations. There is little sense in speculating about the response, but if they take physical steps, they will regret it in a big way.”

The British fears, their hatred towards Russia are born of their own hostile philosophy toward Moscow, which emerged many centuries ago for the reasons mentioned above.

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