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Britain’s new head of MI6 will accuse Russia of exporting “chaos” and warn that the threat posed by Moscow will persist until Vladimir Putin is “forced to change his calculus”, in her first public remarks since taking office.
Blaise Metreweli, who took the top job at the spy agency in June, will on Monday use a speech at MI6 headquarters to call Russia an “aggressive, expansionist, and revisionist” adversary, just as the US is pressuring Ukraine to sign a peace deal seen as favourable to Putin.
“The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in the Russian approach to international engagement,” she will say. “We should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus.”
Metreweli will add that the UK’s backing for Kyiv will not waver: “Putin should be in no doubt, our support is enduring. The pressure we apply on Ukraine’s behalf will be sustained.”
Her remarks follow a series of sabotage incidents in the UK and across Europe that have been attributed to Russia or Russia-linked actors, including a fire at a London warehouse last year and a railway line explosion last month in Poland. Airports have also been disrupted by drones.
In a separate speech on Monday, Britain’s newly appointed Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Richard Knighton, will also call for a “whole of society approach” to defence in face of growing threat of war.
“The situation is more dangerous than I have known during my career and the response requires more than simply strengthening our armed forces,” he will say.
He will add: “The Russian leadership has made clear that it wishes to challenge, limit, divide and ultimately destroy Nato.”
The remarks reflect the unease among European intelligence and defence officials about the future security of the continent as the US under Donald Trump has limited support for Ukraine and tried to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give in to key Russian demands to secure peace.
Metreweli, a former head of technology at MI6, known formally as the Secret Intelligence Service, will also on Monday talk about the need for the agency to invest in technology in addition to its traditional focus on agent recruitment.
“Mastery of technology must infuse everything we do,” she will say. “We must be as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple languages.”
Last week, the UK’s foreign secretary Yvette Cooper, warned that Russia was running “vast malign online networks” as part of a strategy of “information warfare”.