Britain ‘already at war with Russia’ says ex-MI5 chief in chilling Putin verdict

Russia might  already be at war with the UK, a former head of MI5 has warned. Baroness Manningham-Buller, who led the Security Service between 2002 and 2007, said it might be fair to claim that cyberattacks, sabotage and covert operations on British soil mean Russia is already at war with Britain. She told Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast that she agreed with the foreign policy expert Fiona Hill that Moscow was waging a new kind of conflict against the West and Britain.

She said: “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 cyberattacks, the physical attacks, intelligence work is extensive.” Westminster has been increasingly concerned about hybrid warfare. Arsalan Bilal, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Peace Studies, wrote in a NATO blog that one of the key elements of hybrid warfare is that “there is ample room for plausible deniability – and there is often little evidence to establish culpability.” Examples of hybrid warfare include non-state actors, political assassinations, espionage, cyber-attacks, electoral interference, and disinformation.

Manningham-Buller, who spent more than 30 years in MI5, recalled Putin’s hostility to the West when he ordered the poisoning and subsequent murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service.

She said: “We all hoped that at the end of the Soviet Union we would have a potential partner. 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. I didn’t anticipate that within a year he’d be ordering the murder on London streets of Alexander Litvinenko.”

She also highlighted the authority of Hill, a biographer of Putin, adviser to President Trump during his first term, and co-author of Sir Keir Starmer‘s 2025 strategic defence review. In an interview with The Guardian, Hill said the UK is in a “pretty big trouble”, describing it being geopolitically caught between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s unpredictable US.

Without firing a shot, Putin has over the past few weeks managed to bring the war in Ukraine to millions of Europeans by violating the airspace of multiple EU countries. After waves of drones shut down Danish airspace last week, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned a “hybrid war” has started in Europe. If the situation were to deteriorate, the UK could be brought to a standstill, with no flights, limited infrastructure and food shortages, according to Mr de Bretton-Gordon, a former British Army colonel and chemical weapons expert.

He told The Telegraph: “Trump’s indecision is fuelling Russia‘s hybrid war against the West. If Russia can persuade Europe that the US will not come to their aid and will not support Article 5, they have nearly won.”