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Britain needs to re-arm and build reserves through a form of national service to defend against Vladimir Putin’s hopes to dominate eastern Europe and undermine the west, the former head of MI6 has warned.
Sir Alex Younger said people in the UK must realise that the threat from Russia - and its closeness to the US - is real, adding: “Putin and Trump together have done their best to persuade us that the rules have changed”.
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Reflecting on whether Britain has the mettle for a full-scale war, he [said]: "We have, for many years, been completely free of any form of existential threat [...] We've unforgivably… launched a set of wars of choice, which have imposed sacrifice needlessly on young people and there's great cynicism about this idea of collective effort to defend your country."
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Discussing what need to be done to prepare, Sir Alex, known as “C” during his time as spy chief, added: “You'd have to ask a soldier about the actual efficacy of things like conscription. I have no idea… I know that it just needs to be a more integrated feature of everyday life."
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“In a sense, that's not the point [whether or not Trump is a Russian agent]. The point is he agrees with Vladimir Putin. He agrees that big countries get additional rights over small countries, particularly in their own backyard.”
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“It really depends on how close to Moscow you are. I think in Finland it's well understood [that there is a threat of Russia attacking othrr European countries] and there's a properly integrated resilient culture where everyone is accustomed to playing their part. I think we go to Portugal at the other end that's just not true - and in a sense that's understandable."
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[Dr Rachel] Ellehuus, [an American, former US defence secretary’s envoy to Nato, and now head of the the Royal United Services Institute, Britain’s leading security thinktank], said that while the threat posed by the Kremlin had been persistent, it has been the dramatic shift in Washington that has been the greatest strategic shock [and argued that] a hybrid war with Russia - where disinformation, cyberattacks and economic pressure are equally important - is already underway.
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This threat has intensified following the sudden change in strategic ideology in Washington under Trump [according to Ellehuus].
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“The galvanizing moment for Europe? Yes. Take a look at the Trump-Putin relationship or the Trump/MAGA-Putin relationship,” she said.
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"Am I saying he's going to invade the Baltic states or Poland tomorrow? I'm not. But he is going to test the boundaries of what we call Article 5, which is the commitment that an attack against one Nato ally is an attack against all of them.
“He's already been pushing the boundaries of that through below-the-threshold activities that aren't conventional attacks.”
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According to the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, there was a 300 per cent increase in unconventional attacks on Europe by Russia last year, 2023-2024.
“Roughly 27 percent of the attacks were against transportation targets (such as trains, vehicles, and airplanes), another 27 per cent were against government targets (such as military bases and officials), 21 percent were against critical infrastructure targets (such as pipelines, undersea fiber-optic cables, and the electricity grid), and 21 percent were against industry (such as defense companies),” the CSIS said in a report last month.
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