Eliza Manningham-Buller, who met Vladimir Putin while still driving the agency in 2005, remembers how the West was naive at the time for thinking that Russia would become “a partner”
The United Kingdom may already be at war with Russia, warns Eliza Manningham-Buller, former Mi5 director, UK security service.
The warning was made during an interview with House of Lords (House of Lords, the British High Chamber), in which Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was at the head of Mi5 between 2002 and 2007, considers that the relationship with Russia has changed “since the Ukraine invasion.”
Over the past three years, the former Mi5 director says she has knowledge of “various things” orchestrated by the Russians in Britain. “Sabotage, collection of information, attacks on people and so on,” he lists.
Hence it agrees with the voices that have warned that Britain is already involved in a war with Russia, as is the case of Fiona Hill, the UK defense counselor, which, taking into account “poisons, homicides, sabotage operations, all types of computer attacks and influence operations”, it is clear that “Russia is at war with us [os britânicos].”
“I believe it may be right in saying that we are already at war with Russia. It’s a different type of war, but hostility, computer attacks, physical attacks and intelligence work are broad,” says Eliza Manningham-Buller.
The former Mi5 director worked at the agency for 34 years, becoming director general in 2002 before reforming herself in 2007. Eliza Manningham-Buller recalls the day she met Vladimir Putin in person after the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland.
“We all expected that Russia’s past would not prevail and that, with the end of the Soviet Union, the West had a partner. And that was one of the reasons why Putin was with us in the G8 in 2005,” he explains.
The former Mi5 director now recognizes how they were “wrong” about Putin. “I never imagined that, in less than a year, he [o presidente russo] It would order Litvinenko’s murder on the streets of London, ”he says, referring to Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who was killed in 2006, almost three weeks after drinking poisoned tea with radioactive pool.
Before fleeing Russia and receiving British nationality, Litvinenko accused Putin of corruption. According to the British press, it seems, Litvinenko was poisoned during a meeting with two Russian spies in a London hotel.
