LONDON (AP) — The head of Britain’s MI6 spy agency said Monday that Russian 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.”
Blaise Metreweli said Putin is “dragging out negotiations” on stopping the conflict, and remains determined to “subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO members.”
Metreweli made the comments in her first public speech since becoming chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency two months ago.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
LONDON (AP) — The new head of the MI6 spy agency is set to warn on Monday of how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to export chaos around the world is rewriting the rules of conflict and creating new security challenges.
Blaise Metreweli will use her first public speech as chief of the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service to say that Britain faces increasingly unpredictable and interconnected threats, with emphasis on “aggressive, expansionist” Russia.
“The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in the Russian approach to international engagement, and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus,” she will say, according to extracts released by the Foreign Office, which oversees MI6.
The MI6 chief, known as C, is the only employee of the secretive agency whose name is made public. Metreweli, who took over from Richard Moore at the end of September, was previously the MI6 director of technology and innovation — the real-world equivalent of the fictional James Bond gadget-master Q.
She plans to say that technological savvy and human intelligence are both key to combating hybrid 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.”
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 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 cyber-activities.”
Metreweli is the first woman to hold the post since MI6 was founded in 1909.
Britain’s two other main intelligence agencies have already shattered the spy world’s glass ceiling. MI5, the domestic security service, was led by Stella Rimington from 1992 to 1996 and Eliza Manningham-Buller between 2002 and 2007. Anne Keast-Butler became head of the electronic and cyberintelligence agency GCHQ in 2023.
The spy chief’s 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 met U.S. envoys on Sunday in Berlin, 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.
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.
