PROF ANTHONY GLEES

Director, Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at The University of Buckingham

WE believe the GRU may have as many as 80,000 personnel. It is far larger than it was in the days of the USSR.

Today we know for sure that at least two GRU officers were responsible for the Salisbury attack, following the 2006 assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London.

We believe it is also responsible for more than a dozen killings of Russians and those associated with them in the UK since 2012. They are killers.

These “wet jobs” are a practice today’s Kremlin has inherited from the Soviet era, but there are far more of them and the UK seems to be a special area of operations for the GRU, charged with executing them.

Reckless

To their foul toolkit of chemical poisons, the Kremlin has now added cyber weaponry. Russia, under Putin, now has a systematic and reckless strategy to destroy our capacity to protect and prepare against chemical weapons attack.

To execute this, Putin has developed the GRU into a highly dangerous trained cadre of special attack troops. The Kremlin is also using the space created by the internet to attack us at will in our own cyber space by subverting democratic processes.

It would, I think, be wrong to use the same cyber weapons as Putin. Rather, we should seize Russian assets in the UK and offshore, estimated at about £40billion in the UK, and £34billion in places like the British Virgin Islands.

Money lies at the heart of Putin’s hold on Russia. Let’s hit him where it hurts.