Tag Archives: Vladimir Putin

Britain, Europe, Government, Russia, Society

The prospect of an escalating global war is terrifyingly real

THE WEST AND RUSSIA

THERESA MAY made perhaps the most momentous statement of her political career at Westminster when, in a dramatic scene in the Commons, she effectively accused the Russian state of an act of war. She said the Kremlin had instructed its military intelligence agency, the GRU, to assassinate the defector Sergei Skripal in March.

Backed up by a wealth of irrefutable evidence about the two Russian intelligence agents who carried out the assignment, which ultimately resulted in the death of a British citizen and three other serious poisoning cases, Mrs May’s assertion has huge implications, not only for Britain’s relations with the rogue Russian regime, but also for European and Western foreign policy as a whole.

The Salisbury incident is truly shocking. It is the first time that a Briton has been killed on our home soil by a chemical weapon deployed by a foreign power. Yet until it happened, Britain seemed utterly indifferent to the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s government.

 

AFTER Putin sanctioned and authorised another well publicised assault on British soil in 2006, when ex-Russian secret policeman Alexander Litvinenko was murdered with a radioactive poison in London, the initial shock and anger soon ebbed away to apathy, thanks in large part to the feebleness of our Government’s response.

Whilst it is true that the British authorities were quick to name the Russian suspects, the speed of this early announcement was not matched by resolute action from the Government.

The huffing and puffing in Whitehall produced half-measures. That can only have reassured the Russian spymasters that they could get away with assassination.

Sine then we have all become aware of the litany of charges against Russia, like its seizure of Crimea, its blood-soaked intervention in Syria in aide of President Assad’s tyranny and its shooting down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 over rebel-held Ukraine in 2014.

But all those atrocities happened abroad, it was argued. They were nothing to do with us, so a proverbial slap on the wrists would surely do.

In contrast, from the start of the Skripal case, the Prime Minister has been far tougher, imposing sanctions, expelling Russian diplomats, galvanising NATO, and even winning the support of Donald Trump’s White House and the EU for her actions.

Admittedly, this was partly because the potential consequence of the Salisbury poisoning was even more serious than the Litvinenko case, given that Novichok put hundreds of lives at risk.

Nevertheless, the British Government has, despite all its problems with Brexit, displayed a commendable spirit of resolution that has been all too absent until now.

Through her clear-sighted resolution, Theresa May has mounted a direct challenge to Putin’s regime.

And although it has taken six months to name the alleged perpetrators, it has been worth the wait. Thanks to the thoroughness of the investigation, the sheer weight of incriminating material she was able to announce in the Commons means that the Russian state cannot slide away from its responsibility for this crime.

What her Commons statement also did was to blow apart the absurd conspiracy theories about the Salisbury assault that have been circulating, many of them promoted by Putin’s regime or by Kremlin sympathisers.

The evidence, gathered by 250 detectives from 11,000 hours of CCTV footage, shows incontestably where the blame lies. This raises the question as to why the Kremlin resorted to such an act. The answer lies in Putin’s security policy, which is so important to his macho political persona and the image of his regime’s invincibility.

As a former KGB officer himself, he has made ruthlessness a central part of his strongman reputation. It thereby enhances his appeal among the Russian people.

When he first came to power in 2000 on his election as Russian president, there were profound weaknesses in the country’s security apparatus, epitomised by the defections of agents like Litvinenko and Skripal.

 

SO much information was leaked after the fall of communism that Western intelligence thought they had crippled Russia’s GRU agency, giving MI6 and the CIA a window directly into Russian policymaking which helped them to predict the Kremlin’s actions.

But Putin changed all that through a pitiless crackdown. Internal security was vastly improved and leaks closed.

The CIA has privately admitted that many of its contacts in Moscow have gone silent. Some have disappeared. Others simply do not respond to efforts to contact them.

Dealing mercilessly with the defectors became an essential part of that security crackdown.

Since March, it has often been asked why Skripal, a former double agent, should still be a target, so many years after Putin let him out of the Gulag and allowed him to retire to Britain. It appears that Putin’s intelligence services have decided that letting defectors sleep soundly at night offers too much temptation for others to follow suit.

Kill one, frighten 10,000 is an old tactic, and one that the Russians seem to have adopted. Washington certainly believes that putting the fear of God into potential double-agents was the real reason for poisoning Sergei Skripal.

The Salisbury attack may also reflect Putin’s wider, geopolitical strategy, with its focus on dividing the West through surprise, propaganda and intimidation. Years ago he decided the West, particularly America and Britain, wanted to get rid of his regime.

Instead of asking what he could do to allay Western concerns, he adopted the opposite course by using Russian wealth from the country’s energy resources, plus the long experience of Soviet spycraft, to mount campaigns of disinformation and denial.

Until Salisbury, that strategy appeared to be working. The Novichok assault, however, led to an unprecedented act of unity – due in part to the British Government’s resolve.

The West hung together and backed Britain. The question now is whether this accord will last. The Prime Minister has said that she will be trying to mobilise the EU to harden sanctions on Russia and co-ordinate counter-measures against Russian intelligence operations in Europe.

That could be easier said than done. The wall of unity is already showing signs of cracking. Apart from the awkwardness created by Brexit, Putin’s policy of divide and conquer is also having an impact, for the Russian president has been soft-talking allies in the EU.

Last month, for instance, he was a guest at the Austrian foreign minister’s wedding, and Vienna’s Right-wing government is one of the loudest voices in the EU clamouring for improving relations with Moscow.

In Italy, the new government is led by a critic of sanctions against Russia, so imposing new ones is unlikely to win Rome’s support.

Yet, Britain cannot possibly let the Salisbury attack slide away into unpunished oblivion as it did the Litvinenko case.

The need for action is all the more important because, worryingly, the balance of global power is sliding away from the West. The U.S., Britain and the EU are still economically potent, of course, but the rise of China as both an economic and military superpower adds to the challenge posed by Russia and other states.

Even Turkey, a member of NATO, is moving away from the West under President Erdogan. The fact is that the Salisbury outrage is a graphic indicator that the world is becoming a less stable place. It was a rare but disturbing episode that exposed the nature of the escalating global war between spy agencies.

In its aftermath, that war is likely to intensify.

Which makes it all the more imperative that the Government is robust and vigilant. The West needs to be resolute and united in the face of Putin’s ruthlessness.

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Britain, European Union, National Security, Russia

Putin blasted by MI5 for ‘fog of lies’ over Salisbury

BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

Head of MI5: Andrew Parker

Intro: Andrew Parker speaks out for the first time since the Salisbury nerve agent attack

THE head of MI5, Britain’s intelligence service, has launched an excoriating attack on Russia, accusing Vladimir Putin’s regime of flagrant breaches of international law.

Andrew Parker used his first public speech outside of the UK by taking aim at the Russian president and his “aggressive and pernicious” agenda.

He told European security chiefs the Salisbury poisonings were a deliberate and malign act that could turn Russia into a “more isolated pariah”. He also launched a strident attack on the “fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation” that pours out of Mr Putin’s propaganda machine.

Mr Parker’s speech in Berlin was the first time he has spoken publicly since the attempted assassination in Salisbury of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in March.

The attack, with the Novichok toxin, marked the first use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

The MI5 director-general said that with an unrelenting international terrorist threat and rising state aggression, the UK and Europe need to work together more than ever.

His words are likely to have been interpreted as a warning to Brussels to agree a post-Brexit deal on security cooperation. That has been in growing doubt amid a row over whether Britain will still be allowed to participate in the EU’s multi-billion-pound Galileo global navigation satellite project. But Mr Parker reserved his toughest language for Russia, saying that Mr Putin’s government is pursuing an agenda through aggressive actions by its intelligence services.

He accused the Kremlin of flagrant breaches of international rules, warning that the Salisbury attack was a “deliberate and targeted malign activity”.

Britain’s security agencies are still trying to identify those individuals behind the attack. It is understood there are several persons of interest who are back in Moscow and may have been in the UK at the time of the poisoning.

Mr Parker, who has been head of the security service since 2013, also condemned the unprecedented level of Russian disinformation following the attack, saying it highlights the need “to shine a light through the fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation that pours out of their propaganda machine”.

In the wake of the attack, Theresa May said “Kremlin-inspired” accounts were posting lies as “part of a wider effort to undermine the international system”.

Mr Parker did, however, praise the international response to the incident in his speech which was hosted by Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service.

He noted that 28 European countries agreed to support the UK in expelling scores of Russian diplomats.

In 2017, Mrs May’s national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, said the threat from Moscow was worse than ever imagined. He warned that it was intensifying and diversifying.

 

MR Parker also told EU security leaders in Berlin that Internet giants have an “ethical responsibility” to prevent hostile states spreading a “torrent of lies” online. He said that “bare-faced lying” had become the “default mode” of the Russian state.

He added that there was a “great deal more” that could be done with internet providers to stop the exploitation of the web.

MI5’s director-general said Europe faced sustained hostile activity from states including Russia who he described as the “chief protagonist”.

In his speech, he said: “Age-old attempts at covert influence and propaganda have been supercharged in online disinformation, which can be churned out on a massive scale and at little cost. The aim is to sow doubt by flat denials of the truth, to dilute truth with falsehood, divert attention to fake stories, and do all they can to divide alliances.

“Bare-faced lying seems to be the default mode, coupled with ridicule of critics.”

The Russian state’s now well-practiced doctrine of blending media manipulation, social media disinformation and distortion with new and old forms of espionage, high levels of cyber-attacks, military force and criminal thuggery is what is meant these days by the term “hybrid threats”. Russia’s state media and representatives instigated at least 30 different so-called explanations of the Salisbury poisonings in their efforts to “mislead the world and their own people,” Mr Parker said.

One recent media survey found that two-thirds of social media output at the peak of the Salisbury attack came from Russian government-controlled accounts.

Last October, MI5’s chief said he wanted internet companies to do more to stop extremists using the “safe spaces” on the web to learn illicit techniques such as bomb-making.

This week’s keynote speech was the first time he has called on web giants to do far more. “We are committed to working with them as they look to fulfil their ethical responsibility to prevent terrorist, hostile state and criminal exploitation of internet carried services: shining a light on terrorists; taking down bomb-making instructions; warning the authorities about attempts to acquire explosives precursors.

“This matters and there is much more to do,” the director-general of MI5 said.

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Britain, Economic, Government, National Security, Russia, Society, United States

Russia’s ‘tremendous weapon’

CYBER WARFARE

SECURITY CHIEFS have warned that tens of thousands of British families’ computers have been targeted by Russia – potentially paving the way for a devastating cyber-attack.

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They fear the Kremlin is trying to identify vulnerabilities allowing it to “lay a foundation for offensive future operations” that could cripple Britain.

The concern is that Russia could take control of these devices then use them to overload vital infrastructure systems such as banks, water supplies, energy networks, emergency services and even the Armed Forces.

A so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack could be carried out anonymously because the Government would not know who had hacked into these systems in UK homes.

Security chiefs said they feared Moscow-backed hackers were trying to create a “tremendous weapon” to unleash in “times of tension”. Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ, the White House and the FBI have launched an unprecedented joint alert about “malicious cyber activity” carried out across the globe by the Kremlin.

They warned that Moscow was mounting a campaign to exploit vulnerable devices and threaten “our respective safety, security, and economic well-being”. It followed a recent warning that Vladimir Putin was ready to retaliate for the Western air strikes on Syria, where Bashar al-Assad’s regime is backed by Russia.

Britain has been tracking the online activity for more than a year, a spokesperson for the National Cyber-Security Centre (NCSC) said.

Kremlin-sponsored actors were said to be using “compromised routers” to conduct “spoofing” – when the attacker hides their identity – to “support espionage… and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations”.

In an unusual transatlantic briefing the NCSC said there are millions of machines being globally targeted, with the intent of trying to seize control over connectivity.

“In the case of targeting providers of internet services, it’s about gaining access to their customers to try to gain control over the devices.

“The purpose of these attacks could be espionage, it could be the theft of intellectual property, it could be positioning or use in times of tension. All of the attacks have directly affected the UK.”

The FBI says that US government experts had found themselves “unwittingly on the frontline of the battle” against Moscow’s cyber-attacks. The Bureau said that, if Russia were able to hack into a wireless router then “own it”, hackers could monitor all the traffic going through it. “It is a tremendous weapon”.

A White House cyber security co-ordinator warned the Kremlin that the US and Britain would respond to any attack. The UK has previously carried out a huge cyber offensive against Islamic State, and the US attacked the Iranian nuclear programme by launching the Stuxnet cyber- attack in 2010 which wholly deactivated the programme’s centrifuges.

The US and UK insist they are pushing back hard and say that cyber activity must be stopped and opposed at every turn. They are confident, however, that Russia has already carried out a co-ordinated campaign to gain access to enterprise, small office routers and residential routers – the kind of things that everyone has in their homes.

The NCSC, FBI and US department of homeland security warned that Russian state-sponsored actors were trying to spy on individuals, industries and the Government.

A joint UK-US statement said “multiple sources” – including private and public sector cyber security research organisations and allies – had reported such activity to governments. The communique said: “Russia is our most capable hostile adversary in cyberspace so dealing with their attacks is a major priority.”

A UK Government spokesperson said: “This is yet another example of Russia’s disregard for international norms and global order – this time through a campaign of cyber espionage and aggression, which attempts to disrupt governments and destabilise business. The attribution of this malicious activity sends a clear message to Russia – we know what you are doing, and you will not succeed.”

 

THE warning from intelligence agencies that Russia is launching a cyber offensive against our Government, infrastructure, companies and even families, with the intention of spreading chaos and panic, is hugely significant.

It is a chilling reminder for everyone – if one were needed – that for Vladimir Putin, bombs, missiles and poison gas aren’t the only weapons of war.

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