Former MI5 spy chief warns the UK could already be at war with Russia

The former MI5 spy chief Eliza Manningham-Buller has warned that the UK might already be at war with Russia.

She pointed to the fact that the UK is experiencing a number of cyber attacks including sabotage operations in Britain.

Manningham-Buller was the head of the Security Service between 2002 and 2007 and worked at MI5 for more than three decades.

She warned that Vladimir Putin has started a different kind of war against the West compared to the full-scale conflict seen in Ukraine.

Putin is waging hybrid warfare tactics against the UK and disinformation and violence against the British government.

She told the Lords Speaker’s Corner podcast, Fiona Hill may be right in saying we’re already at war with Russia. It’s a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyber attacks, the physical attacks, intelligence work is extensive.”

She said that she recalls meeting with Putin in 2005, at that time the British government was trying to get Russia involved with international cooperation.

Speaking with Lord McFall of Alcluith, the lord speaker, she said, “We all hoped that the past history of Russia wouldn’t prevail, and that at the end of the Soviet Union, we would have a potential partner.

“And 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 in that, because Russia is extremely hostile to the West … I didn’t anticipate that within a year [2006] he’d be ordering the murder on London streets of [Alexander] Litvinenko.”

Litvinenko was a former Russia agent for the KGB and fled the country in 2000 and he shared information with British and Spanish intelligence services of the Russian mafia operating in Europe.

On 1 November 2006 Litvinenko suddenly fell ill after meeting with two former Russian KGB officers, Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun at the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel, London.

Litvinenko was poisoned with a lethal dose of polonium 210 which triggered acute radiation syndrome, he died three weeks later.

Baroness Manningham-Buller said that since Putin started his war in Ukraine in 2022 this has highlighted how Moscow is committing hostility against the West, she added examples of “sabotage, intelligence collection, attacking people” in the UK.

Earlier this year Hill told the Guardian that the UK is “in pretty big trouble” as the UK is already at war with Russia.