‘We’re already at war’: Ex-MI5 chief warns Putin is already fighting countries

The former head of Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, has come out and warned that the UK is already at war with Russia, just not the kind of war you see in the movies.

Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was the Director General of MI5 from 2002 to 2007, made it clear on the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast that the massive increase in hostile operations like cyberattacks and physical sabotage by the Kremlin means the conflict is already here.

According to The Register, she flat-out agreed with a former White House advisor’s assessment, stressing that while it’s “a different sort of war,” the sheer scale of “the hostility, the cyber attacks, the physical attacks, intelligence work is extensive”. This isn’t some far-off geopolitical theory; it’s a full-on, sustained attack on the West.

It’s easy to dismiss this as just alarmist talk, but when a former MI5 chief says you’re already in a conflict, you’re going to want to pay attention. The baroness, who served in the agency for over three decades, wasn’t talking about tanks or aircraft. She was pointing to the modern, under-the-radar methods Vladimir Putin is already using on UK soil: things like “sabotage, intelligence collection, attacking people”.

Russia has been fighting a different kind of war

This is what the experts call “hybrid warfare,” a nasty combination of cyber operations, disinformation, and targeted violence that falls just below the threshold of a conventional, all-out war—but is absolutely meant to cripple a country all the same. This non-kinetic fighting has been ramping up for a while now, and the sheer hostility being directed at the West, especially “since the invasion of Ukraine,” means we can’t afford to treat it like a distant problem.

Baroness Manningham-Buller was actually echoing the thoughts of foreign policy heavyweight Dr. Fiona Hill, who advised the White House on Russia during Donald Trump’s first term. The former MI5 chief made a point of saying that Hill “probably knows more about Putin than anybody else”. And if the person who probably knows more about Putin than anyone else says we’re at war, to be fair, we’re probably at war.

Dr. Hill has previously warned that the UK is “in pretty big trouble,” caught in a difficult geopolitical spot between “the rock” of Putin’s Russia and “the hard place” of an increasingly unreliable US. That’s a pretty stark picture, and it should certainly make you sit up and take notice. Even Hilary Clinton is trying to get people to see that Russia isn’t playing around anymore.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, especially when you consider how much hope there was for a different kind of relationship with Russia not so long ago. Manningham-Buller recalled a time when, even as MI5 Director General, the hope was that the country would move beyond its Soviet past and become a partner for the West. She actually met Putin in 2005 when he was in London for the G8 summit.

“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,” she said, reflecting on that time. But she was blunt about how wrong they were. “But actually, we were wrong in that, because Russia is extremely hostile to the West and we’ve seen it in all sorts of ways,” she added.