MI5 Chief calls Russia UK’s No. 1 aggressor

This is stated in the annual threat assessment delivered by MI5 Director General Ken McCallum, Ukrinform reports.

“Russia remains aggressor number one, as Putin’s Kremlin continues to lash out at the UK and its allies,” McCallum said.

According to the agency, Moscow has no intention of starting a war with Western countries at present, but has launched a large-scale hybrid influence campaign across Europe.

“The Russian military and intelligence services are once again escalating their attempts at hybrid warfare – being careful to stay below the NATO Article V threshold it’d be foolish for them to cross. This means Russia is using tactics that stop short – though sometimes not much short – of conventional conflict,” the intelligence chief said.

According to him, hybrid attacks are often carried out through proxies, and Russia consistently denies any involvement. However, British security services are accumulating an ever-growing body of evidence to the contrary.

“With its traditional covert footprint eviscerated by almost 1000 expulsions since the invasion, the Kremlin’s global toolkit is weak. So we see them scrambling to pay criminals to do their bidding. Or exploiting naïve volunteers, as in the now-designated GRU Volunteer Corps,” the MI5 chief said.

“These are not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand,” he added.

As Ukrinform reported, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 issued a public warning that Chinese intelligence is using a front company to pay British researchers for access to research and steal secrets from high-tech projects. Beijing denies the allegations.

Photo: mi5.gov.uk