Frontline with Russia is ‘everywhere’ – even ‘in the minds of our citizens’, MI6 chief says | UK News

Russia is trying to “bully, fearmonger and manipulate” the UK and its allies with attacks under the threshold of all-out war, the new head of MI6 has said.

Blaise Metreweli, the first female chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), said Britain was “operating in a space between peace and war” and that everyone has a responsibility to understand the dangers because “the frontline is everywhere”.

In her first big speech on Monday, she also focused on Vladimir Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine, accusing him of “dragging out negotiations” on a peace deal and warning that Kyiv’s fate is “fundamental not just to European sovereignty and security but to global security”.

Offering her view on the evolution of global security threats, Ms Metreweli underlined the transformative role of technology, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing.

She said control over such advanced technologies is shifting from states to corporations and even individuals, making the balance of global power more “diffuse, more unpredictable”.

The spymaster did not name anyone.

However, innovators such as Elon Musk are becoming increasingly influential, with their technologies such as his Starlink satellites and his social media site X.

The boss of MI6 was speaking at her agency’s headquarters in London, though she said that the main work of her spies was carried “many miles away from this place – out of sight, hidden from the world, undercover, recruiting and running agents who choose to place their trust in us, sharing secrets to make the UK and the world safer”.

She warned the world was “more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades”.

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The spy chief said: “Conflict is evolving and trust eroding, just as new technologies spur both competition and dependence.

“We are being contested from sea to space – from the battlefield to the boardroom. And even our brains as disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other and ourselves… We are now operating in a space between peace and war.

“This is not a temporary state or a gradual evolution. Our world is being actively remade with profound implications for national and international security.”

Breaking with a tradition by previous chiefs of offering a view on a range of threats when speaking publicly, Ms Metreweli said she was choosing to focus on Russia.

“We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO,” she said.

On the conflict, she said Putin was “dragging out negotiations and shifting the cost of war on to his own population”.

Her comments come as Donald Trump is attempting to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.

General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, told Sky News in an interview earlier this month that he believed Putin was using the US push for negotiations as “cover” while Russian troops attempted to seize more land by force.

The MI6 boss said the UK’s support for Ukraine would endure regardless of Moscow’s stalling actions.

She also flagged a growing wave of “grey zone” hostilities – deliberately carried out under the threshold of conventional armed conflict – that she attributed to Moscow.

“It’s important to understand their [Russia’s] attempts to bully, fearmonger and manipulate because it affects us all,” she said.

“I am talking about cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. Drones buzzing airports and bases. Aggressive activity in our seas, above and below the waves. State-sponsored arson and sabotage. Propaganda and influence operations that crack open and exploit fractures within societies.”

While she did not specify any particular incidents, there have been a spate of mysterious drone sightings in Denmark, Germany and Sweden; while a Russian spy ship was spotted off the coast of Scotland and acts of arson and sabotage have been carried out in the UK, such as a blaze at a warehouse in east London that was providing aid to Ukraine.

Drawing attention to another method to attack a country and its people, Ms Metreweli underlined how information is being weaponised, with falsehoods spread online that are designed to erode trust in a society and amplify divisions.

“The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus,” she said.

MI6, she said, is adapting to respond to the evolving threats.

But unusually Ms Metroweli also said the wider British public had a role to play, such as with schools helping to educate children to spot disinformation on social media and to check sources of news “and be alive to those algorithms that trigger intense reactions like fear”.

She added: “It also means everyone in society really understanding the world we are in – a world where… the frontline is everywhere. Online, on our streets, in our supply chains, in the minds and on the screens of our citizens.”

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