Britain may already be in war with Russia due to the intensity and seriousness of cyberattacks, sabotage and other enemy actions organized by Moscow against the United Kingdom, according to a former head of MI5.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, who led the domestic espionage service two decades ago, said she agrees with the comments from the Russian Fiona Hill Specialist, which backed an interview with the Guardian earlier this year that Moscow is in war.

Manningham-Buller argued that the situation has changed “from the invasion of Ukraine and the various things I have read about the actions of the Russians here-sabotage, collection of information, attacks on people and so on.”

Speaking to a podcast in which John McFall interviewed her, she then referred to Hill, who was a consultant to Donald Trump during his first term as US President and one of the authors of the UK Defense Strategic Review.

“I think he is right when he says we are already in war with Russia. It is a different war, but the cyberattacks, physical attacks and intelligence activities are extensive, “he said.

Six Bulgarians living in the United Kingdom were imprisoned this year to participate in a espionage network that carried out hostile surveillance across Europe, while five men were convicted of their involvement in an arson attack ordered by Moscow in a warehouse containing supplies.

Pat McFadden, a former minister of the prime minister’s office, said last year that Russia had intensified its cyberattacks against the United Kingdom. Hackers have targeted a series of British businesses. Although the detection of the source of attacks may take time, many of them are likely to come from Russia.

Many of the United Kingdom allies in NATO in Eastern Europe have been influenced by recent incidents with drones, most notably Poland, where 19 Russian drones invaded the country’s airspace this month.

At the beginning of Manningham-Buller’s term as head of the MI5 between 2002 and 2007, there were hopes that Russia under Vladimir Putin would not return to its Soviet practices and would become a possible partner for the West.

Manningham-Buller met Putin in 2005, when he visited London after the G8 summit in Scotland.

“I didn’t expect that in a year he would ordered Alexander Litvinenko’s assassination on the streets of London, but I considered him a pretty unpleasant man,” he noted.

Litvinenko, a former spy of the Russian FSB living in London, became ill and died in 2006 after poisoning a Polish radioactive. A public survey conducted a decade later concluded that two Russian agents killed him and that they were probably acting on Putin’s command.

.