Why Russia is ‘relentlessly targeting’ the UK

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:12The head of the UK's largest spy agency has just issued one of the most alarming warnings yet about the threat Vladimir Putin poses to our day-to-day life. And this is why.

0:30I'm Sam Coates from Sky News. And I'm Anne McElvoy from Politico. Downing Street drama, leadership battles and policy U-turns. We're on it before it breaks. We take you straight into the rooms where the real political conversations are happening. Smart Insight, clear analysis in your feeds by 7.45am. So you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam & Anne's wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04The UK isn't engaged in a military conflict with Russia, but that doesn't mean we're not coming under attack. The head of GCHQ, the UK's intelligence and cyber agency, has been speaking about the Kremlin's so-called hybrid war on our way of life and its possible devastating consequences. Where Russia is scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the UK and Europe, relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust. Ankees Butler also used her inaugural speech to say the risk of a miscalculation is as high as she has ever seen. Only last month, the UK's Defence Secretary, John Healy, said three Russian submarines were detected hovering over vital undersea cables in the North Atlantic.

1:52And last week, Mr Healy was on board an RF jet that had its signal jammed as it flew near the Russian border. So what threat does Russia pose to the UK? And why are they doing this and what are we doing to counteract it? On a daily basis, the Russians are attacking Britain more than almost any other European country. Sky's military analyst is Michael Clarke and joins us now. People will be well aware of MI6, MI5. They might be less aware of GCHQ. What is it? What does it do? Yeah, it's a listening post. goes back to the First World War, the old cipher school, or people who were ciphering and decoding.

2:29And it's been in Cheltenham since 1952, 53, because they wanted out of London for nuclear reasons in case there was a nuclear attack. So it happened to be in Cheltenham, which is a nice place to be. And of the intelligence areas in Britain, so there's MI5, which deals with domestic security, MI6, which is foreign intelligence, GCHQ, which is the listening post, and then there's defence intelligence, which is all these, there's Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence. That's quite a big organization, actually. But GCHQ works all the time with the National Security Agency in the States, and it exchanges material literally on a daily basis, literally.

3:05The NSA and GCHQ, taken together, is the most powerful hub of listening anywhere in the world. Even without the NSA, GCHQ is probably the second most powerful listening hub throughout the world. and it employs these 7 ,000 people who are all decoders one way or another. They're all specialists and famously they all say they're terribly introvert. Anyone who works at GCHQ is introvert. The joke that goes around is that an extrovert in GCHQ is somebody who looks at your shoes when he's talking to you rather than his own. And they revel in that reputation that they're secretive, they're introvert, they just do what they do.

3:41I've been there and I've talked to some of these people. They're very, very good at what they do and they take pride in the fact that nobody outside the system has any idea what they're really up to. I'm going to ask you more questions to try and find out more about them. But you talk about the introverts. One person that can't be an introvert is the director, making an inaugural speech. What do we know about her? Because spies are not supposed to really know an awful lot. She's very impressive. She worked for MI5 for many years and she became deputy director of MI5 and she was seconded to GCHQ for a while, working specifically on counter-terrorism and serious organised crime, which go together all the time.

4:20Terrorists and criminals, they're not the same, but they do figures of eight. Birds of a feather. Absolutely, yeah. And they come together for a certain purpose, then they leave again. If terrorists and criminals stick together for long, the terrorists turn into criminals. So serious organised crime and counter-terrorism are two logical things. She's good operationally, and she was in charge of operations with MI5, and she's also good organisationally. And here she is giving the inaugural lecture at Bletchley Park. So this will be presumably an annual event and it celebrates the 80th anniversary of the relationship going back to 1946 between GCHQ and what is now the National Security Agency in the States.

4:55So there's something to celebrate in American-British relations, which, as I say, in the intelligence field, in this particular field, are unprecedented. Part of the lecture is a warning, a really rather strong warning about Russia and its nefarious activities. How serious is the threat from Moscow? I hear the same thing. I heard it earlier in this year from the National Cybersecurity Center, which is the sort of commercial element of GCHQ advising businesses. I hear it from defense intelligence. I hear it from people involved in the Strategic Defense Review of last year. The story is exactly the same, that on a daily basis, the Russians are attacking Britain more than almost any other European country with cyber attacks, with attacks on our critical national infrastructure, attempts to create division within society, attempts to manipulate social media just to create doubt about the credibility of all government messages and to affect our democracy and to affect our elections.

5:59And the Russians do seem to have put Britain in the crossfairs more than Germany or France or other major European countries. And they do that for very specific reasons because they think that Britain is isolated, that we've isolated ourselves from our European partners and that we're relatively isolated from the United States and that if they can undermine Britain, it will be a victory for them. So they do these covert operations. There's also overt. They poisoned and killed Alexander Litvinenko. They had a good go at trying to poison and kill Sergei Skripal as well. You know, there are things that are in the public consciousness as much as there are things that aren't.

6:34And it all builds into this descriptor of hybrid warfare. Yeah, it's hybrid and sub-threshold. Those are the technical terms. So hybrid means it's across everything. So it's using social media, using recruiting groups of kids that you can just pay some money to, create some mischief and light some fires. And there has been some arson attacks, which look as if they go back to deniable gangs that are working for Russia, working with criminals, right across to military operations. There is a Russian frigate that is sitting off the coast of Suffolk, the Grigovich. And the Grigovich is escorting Russian ships in and out of the Channel, the Dark Fleet, and we don't take them on.

7:09and the reasons why we don't take them on, and the Russians understand that. Right through from military affairs, right through to cyber, it's hybrid. It uses a bit of everything. And it's sub-threshold in the sense that it's right up to the threshold of physical violence, including, as you say, like with the poisoning of Litvinenko. It crosses that threshold now and again. But in general, it's just below the threshold. So it's deniable. It's just about something you can laugh off if you're in Moscow. You can say it's all British neurosis that accuses us of all of this. and it challenges us all the time.

7:41By and large, we rise to the challenge in some areas, but not in others, and I think that's what they're probably taking from all of this. How does this period compare to what's gone before? The Cold War was torrid for this kind of activity. The American embassy in Russia was bugged to hell. There was a bug hidden inside a wooden shield that was donated, I think, by schoolchildren at the time. There was all sorts of activity going on. Is 2026 any worse? In one sense, I mean, the Russians acted in a fairly hybrid way during the Cold War because the Russians have always had, it goes back to Leninist thinking about warfare.

8:13They've always had this view that in war you use everything you've got. You don't just fight with troops in uniform. You fight with everything that's available. And we compartmentalize it much more in democracies because we don't like the idea of using everything as part of the state and using everything as having a military purpose. But in the Cold War, a lot of it didn't work very well. The amount of stuff they put out in newspapers and Soviet news and the Daily Worker and that sort of thing, trying to subsidize a British paper to carry the right messages and so on, it was very ineffective. The difference now is that with social media and the ability to target and discriminate who you're talking to, exactly honing your messages to that person's vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, that's what's different.

8:54And so the same type of techniques that we saw ineffectively used in the Cold War can now be used much more effectively in this particular era. And that's what's worrying is that democracies find it hard to keep up with that because they're having to become more controlling themselves to deal with a dictatorship which has no qualms about using everything in a very authoritarian way. Is there not the chance that the hybrid warfare will go wrong and that you could inadvertently then end up with the real prospect of more militarised conflict? Yeah, exactly. And that's what the government always says.

9:27They say this behaviour is reckless. They say, look, we know you're doing it and we counter it most of the time. For instance, there's this big set of antenna in Kaliningrad, which is the Russian enclave in Lithuania. And that antenna has been used, it's been in the news recently, to blind the GPS of certain aircraft carrying Western politicians in and out of the Baltics. John Healy. John Healy. And that happened, what, about a week ago when he visited troops in Estonia. Now, the point is it's not the most serious thing in the world. There's different ways of navigating an aircraft without GPS and so on, but it's inconvenient.

9:59And the point is we always say this is reckless because it messes up other aircraft that you're not really targeting and it can go wrong. And the Russians know that and they are reckless in what they do. So that's what Russia's doing. Let's take this back to GCHQ. What are they doing? Are they being defensive or are they also being offensive? Both. They used to say we're purely defensive and we used to say, well, we don't have an offensive cyber capacity. We don't do it. We all knew that wasn't really true. And from 2016 onwards, in my memory, we started to say, yes, we do have an offensive cyber capacity and we want our opponents to know that.

10:38And of course, if we use our offensive cyber capacity, then we won't talk about it. And it's deniable. And so we won't say to them, we just use this to mess up your system. Their system will be messed up and we'll watch to see how they deal with it. So yes, both we and the Americans have quite powerful offensive cyber capacities. That doesn't really come from GCHQ. But I mean, GCHQ is this great listening post. And a lot of conspiracy theorists think, oh, GCHQ is listening to us all the time. That's completely wrong. It's completely impossible. Can't do that. because the cyber world is so huge.

11:10But I say GCHQ, imagine it like a lighthouse. It has a beam of light. It's quite a narrow beam of light, but it can push that beam almost anywhere in the world. So say we're getting interested in Yemen. If it's necessary, you could pick up all the communications going on in Yemen, say. All sorts of ways, all right? They can listen to phone calls being made by people in Yemen. It's like a beam of light that they can throw anywhere, more or less, in cyberspace. and see what's happening. But it's a narrow beam, so they can absorb an enormous amount of material about a small area. And they have to decide which small areas in conjunction with the United States are most important, what they want to do.

11:49And they can't just decide it on a whim. I mean, if Anke's Butler says, oh, I think we should do this or do that, she can't just do that. It has to be done with government approval. The targets are established, campaigns are established, and they work on projects which they share with the United States. That, you know, we look at this, you look at that, and then we'll share material as and when we get it. And that's what they do. And they do it with the other five eyes as well, with Canada, Australia, New Zealand. They divide up the world, for instance. So Australia and New Zealand concentrate more on gathering intelligence on East Asia.

12:18And they give that to us. And then we gather more intelligence on the Atlantic and the Mid-Atlantic and Western Europe. And we give that to them. And we all share our intelligence within the five eyes, which is this very powerful intelligence organization, those five countries. Everybody would like to get into the five eyes. And by definition, nobody else can. The five eyes. The most powerful listening organisation, collaboration of countries, but the closest relationship is still between the UK and the US. They share intelligence on a level that nobody else does. For example... On a daily basis.

12:48On a daily basis. For example, we utilise American nuclear facilities in our warheads, in our rockets. That happens nowhere else. There's data that we have that nobody else has. And I wonder when Donald Trump talks so ill of Europe and of NATO and of traditional allies, even the UK, does that risk the proximity of that relationship? It would over the longer term. Yeah. If Trumpism lasts for a while, if MAGA republicanism goes for, let's say, for eight more years after President Trump, then that relationship could be affected. But that relationship between Britain and America, I always say I don't like the phrase special relationship at all because I think it's so foolish.

13:25but we have a specialist relationship with the United States based on this incredible intelligence sharing and that is absolutely unique based on nuclear sharing and then based on a lot of military cooperation between Britain and the United States armed forces. The two navies are very close. The two air forces are very close. Armies are a bit less close because they're different sorts of animals. The two navies, the two air forces are working together all the time and the intelligence people work together all the time and that creates this sort of undercurrent of day-to-day cooperation. And I ask people who are involved in this, when I see them, I say, do you feel any of the pressures of the top-level turbulence?

14:03And they say, not yet. That's what they tell me, not yet. It feels okay, but we are aware of it. We will see. And I think Britain has got to be prepared for some deterioration in that relationship. But it's a very two-way relationship. Believe me, the NSA in Washington would really suffer if GCHQ didn't operate in the way that it does. And if they cut the relationship in some respects, they would suffer quite a lot. It is a relationship of equals when it comes to analysis and the understanding of how to interpret intelligence, how to go after the targets that you really want.

14:45I'm Sam Coates from Sky News. And I'm Anne McElvoy from Politico. Downing Street drama, leadership battles and policy U-turns. We're on it before it breaks. We take you straight into the rooms where the real political conversations are happening. Smart Insight, clear analysis in your feeds by 7.45am. So you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam & Anne's wherever you get your podcasts.

15:19We've done a really good job in coming this far in this conversation without mentioning two other elements, China and AI. And I feel as though we do that because we mirror slightly Enkis Butler's inaugural speech. She gives the vast majority to Russia and reserves less attention, certainly at this moment, for China and AI. I guess because in many respects they are more important to our day-to-day lives. We need to have a trade relationship with China. It's the second biggest economy in the world. What are the warnings, the risks, and I guess also the opportunities there? The fact is the Russians are the biggest challenge, and the vast majority of cyber attacks launched on Britain are inspired by Russia or Iran.

15:59And then the third one is China, but it's very much the third one. Russia and Iran are the two biggest instigators. The cyber attacks that are freelancers or kids sitting in their bedrooms are just a nuisance. They're not strategically important. The cyber attacks that matter, most of them, something like two-thirds it is thought, come from Russia. and another group come from Iran and some come from China. The intelligence relationship with China is interesting. I mean, not so long ago, I remember hearing a chief of defense intelligence saying we used to walk all the way through the Chinese system.

16:27We just walked through it because their security was so bad. We had complete visions of what the Chinese were doing. No longer. They've really tightened up. And they are a coming challenge in a cybersecurity space. And, I mean, that is certainly true. but it's a less immediate problem because the Chinese don't have Britain in the crosshairs in the way that Russia does. And they seem to value Britain. The fact that the Chinese are establishing this enormous embassy in the old Royal Mint opposite Tower Bridge, you could say is a view that they think were a soft touch for a massive embassy. But two, you could say, well, it shows that they think that Britain is the integrator of an awful lot of European politics and that a lot of international politics can be viewed equally through London as easily or better than from Paris or Berlin or whatever.

17:15And there's been traditionally a view that Chinese spying activity has been more centred around industrial secrets, around technology, around being able to get an edge in industry and e-commerce than it is about being able to open the floodgates of a reservoir and take out a town or to turn off the train lines or whatever. Is that a fair analysis? Yes, it is. Chinese espionage has always been more industrial espionage than anything else. But having said which, when I was director of RUSI, the Royal United Service Institute, we were constantly targeted by Chinese cyber attacks, trying to get into our website, which they never did, incidentally.

17:53But every time they tried, it cost me another 10 or 15 ,000 to put it right, which is why I feel so sore about it. And they were trying to get hold of our lists, all the lists of our members and the people who came to our meetings because they're cross-checking everyone. They collect everything. They burgled us twice, physically burgled us. He used to follow us around London. I mean, it was comical, to be honest. And I have no hesitation in saying that, because that's my personal experience of Chinese espionage. But none of that was as sinister as the experience we now have of Russian espionage, which in the last five years or so is really directed towards Britain.

18:29So yes, China is an issue. It's a challenge. And so are other nations as well. But Russia and Iran are the two biggest. So final thought for our audience, what should they do? Keep calm and carry on. We have to build resilience in this country. And resilience means not avoiding challenges, but being ready for the effects of them. We've got to think in terms of how would we deal with heavy electricity outages? How can we get through an outage? How can we adjust to the fact that our politics are being interfered with? How can we adjust to the fact that the Russians are trying to undermine our democracy at every turn.

19:03You look at the way they try to help certain parties and certain people in certain parties. I think we've just got to be more aware of it. So resilience comes from within. It comes from the psychology more than any, as it were, physical moves that we make. So keep calm and carry on. Be aware. Thanks for listening to This Is Why. You can get in contact with your thoughts on today's episode and share ideas for future episodes by sending us an email. The address, why at sky.uk. And don't forget to follow This Is Why on your podcast app and to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back again tomorrow.

19:46I'm Sam Coates from Sky News. And I'm Anne McElvoy from Politico. Downing Street drama, leadership battles and policy U-turns. We're on it before it breaks. We take you straight into the rooms where the real political conversations are happening. Smart Insight, clear analysis in your feeds by 7.45am. So you start your morning fully brief for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam & Anz wherever you get your podcasts.