Britain might already be at war with Russia, a former MI5 chief has warned, pointing to the rising number of cyber attacks as well as sabotage and covert operations on UK soil.
Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was head of the security service between 2002 and 2007, said Moscow could be waging a different kind of conflict against the West, echoing comments from foreign policy expert Fiona Hill.
The warning comes as concern over hybrid warfare tactics – a combination of cyber war operations, disinformation and targeted violence – grows in Westminster.
Baroness Manningham-Buller told the Lord 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.”
The former security service chief, who worked in MI5 for more than three decades, recalled meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2005 at a time when the UK was attempting to bring Moscow into the fold of 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 he’d be ordering the murder on London streets of [Alexander] Litvinenko.”
In 2006, Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent for the KGB and its post-Soviet successor agency, the FSB, became violently ill in London after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210. He died three weeks later.
A British inquiry found that Russian agents had killed Litvinenko, probably with Putin’s approval, but the Kremlin denied any involvement.
Baroness Manningham-Buller said Moscow’s actions since it launched its war against Ukraine in 2022 have highlighted how the Kremlin had already committed to a period of prolonged hostility against the West, citing examples of “sabotage, intelligence collection, attacking people” in Britain.
She also described Ms Hill, who is a biographer of the Russian president, co-author of Sir Keir Starmer’s 2025 strategic defence review and a former adviser to US president Donald Trump, as someone who “probably knows more about Putin than anybody else”.
Speaking to The Guardian in the summer, Ms Hill warned that the UK is already at war with Russia. “We’re in pretty big trouble,” she said, describing Britain’s geopolitical situation as stuck between “the rock” of Putin’s Russia and “the hard place” of Mr Trump’s increasingly unreliable US.
