MI5 chief lashes Putin for ‘malign’ Salisbury attack
Russia accused of aggressive and pernicious agenda as he targets Kremlin’s ‘fog of lies’
THE head of MI5 will launch an excoriating blast at Russia today, accusing Vladimir Putin’s regime of flagrant breaches of international law.
Andrew Parker will use his first public speech outside the UK to take aim at the Russian president and his ‘aggressive and pernicious’ agenda.
He will tell European security chiefs that the Salisbury poisonings were a deliberate and malign act that could turn Russia into a ‘more isolated pariah’. And he will launch 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 will be 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 will say 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 be interpreted as a warning to Brussels to agree a postBrexit 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 will reserve his toughest language for Russia, saying Mr Putin’s government is pursuing an agenda through aggressive and pernicious actions by its military and intelligence services.
He will accuse 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, will also condemn 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 will, however, praise the international response to the incident in his speech at today’s event, hosted by Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service.
He will note that 28 European countries agreed to support the UK in expelling scores of Russian diplomats.
Earlier this year the Prime Minister set out her ‘unconditional’ determination to agree a comprehensive new agreement on European security co-operation post Brexit.
But since then, she has been locked in a bitter row with the EU over its bid to evict Britain from the Galileo programme. Galileo is the EU’s rival to the American GPS system and is used by the British military to navigate. As a result, Britain has warned the EU it could go it alone and build its own navigational satellite system.
Mr Parker, who will be the first head of MI5 to give a public speech outside the UK, will underline the importance of security co- operation across the continent. He will say that ‘European intelligence cooperation today is simply unrecognisable to what it looked like five years ago’.
Mr Parker will spell out why
‘Shared strength’
an effective security partnership between the UK and Europe is more operationally vital than ever before. He will say ‘in today’s uncertain world we need that shared strength more than ever’.
He will describe how the Counter Terrorism Group, which is made up of 30 European domestic security services, is the ‘largest multinational counter- terrorism enterprise in the world’. This is where ‘real-time intelligence sharing’ involves ‘thousands of exchanges on advanced secure networks every week’.
Last year, 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.