Britain’s MI6 spy chief says Putin is dragging out peace talks and wants to subjugate Ukraine

LONDON (AP) — President Vladimir Putin is stalling efforts to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, and is testing the West with tactics that fall “just below the threshold of war,” the head of Britain’s MI6 spy agency said Monday.

Blaise Metreweli said Putin is “dragging out negotiations” on stopping the conflict, and remains determined to “subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO members.”

“We are now operating in a space between peace and war,” Metreweli said of the wider global threat landscape in her first public speech since becoming chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency two months ago.

Russia accused of exporting chaos

Metreweli accused Moscow of sponsoring cyberattacks on other countries’ critical infrastructure, drone incursions around European airports, campaigns of arson, sabotage and disinformation, and “aggressive activities in our seas, above and below the waves.”

“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.

Metreweli, 48, is the first woman to head the U.K.’s 116-year-old foreign intelligence service. She gave reporters a rare glimpse inside MI6 headquarters in London, which she noted was “familiar to movie fans everywhere” from the James Bond spy thrillers.

Speaking inside the spy chief’s wood-paneled dining room overlooking the River Thames, she said rapidly evolving technology is rewriting the rules of conflict, while hybrid threats from states and extremist groups mean “the front line is everywhere.”

The speech made a brief reference to China’s “implications for national security,” but Metreweli focused on the threat from an “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia.”

“Russia is testing us in the gray zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war,” she said.

Warning comes amid Ukraine peace talks

The warning came amid a flurry of diplomatic meetings aimed at ending the almost four-year war sparked by Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Berlin Monday to meet U.S. envoys, and will meet later with the leaders of Germany, France and Britain. Kyiv’s allies are trying to bolster support for Ukraine amid Washington’s pressure to swiftly accept a U.S.-brokered peace deal.

The MI6 chief, known as C, is the only employee of the secretive agency whose name is made public. In a speech that, unusually, touched on her personal backstory, Metreweli said that coming “from a family shaped by devastating conflict, I grew up with a deep sense of gratitude for the U.K.’s precious democracy and freedom.”

After Metreweli’s appointment was announced in June, media reported that her grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, had been a Nazi spy in Ukraine during World War II.

MI6 said Metreweli never met her grandfather.

Spies must master technology

Metreweli, who has almost three decades of clandestine service and a background in anthropology, psychology and AI, was previously the MI6 director of technology and innovation — the real-world equivalent of the fictional Bond gadget-master Q.

She said technological savvy and human intelligence are both key to combating “an interlocking web” of security threats, and MI6 officers “must be as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple languages.”

“Our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades,” she said, adding that “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.

“The foundations of trust in our societies are eroding. Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponized,” she added.

In a warning to Britain’s adversaries, she said MI6 will “sharpen our edge” and “take calculated risks.” She said the agency should tap into “our historical, SOE instincts,” referring to the clandestine Special Operations Executive that sent agents on daring sabotage missions in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.

“We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them,” she said.

A series of security warnings

The speech is the latest in a series of warnings by Western defense and security authorities about the growing hybrid threat from states such as Russia, Iran and to an extent China, whose use of cyber tools, espionage and influence operations they say threatens global stability.

Last week, the U.K. imposed sanctions on several Russian media outlets for alleged information warfare and two Chinese tech firms for “vast and indiscriminate cyberactivities.”

In a separate speech, the head of the British military, Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, will say Monday that Putin’s aim is “to challenge, limit, divide and ultimately destroy NATO.”

“The war in Ukraine shows Putin’s willingness to target neighboring states, including their civilian populations … threatens the whole of NATO, including the U.K.,” Knighton plans to say, arguing that Britain needs both a stronger military and more resilient infrastructure to meet the evolving threat.

Jill Lawless, The Associated Press