Russia has been waging hybrid warfare against Britain over Ukraine

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Arson at the Prime Minister’s house. Warning shots fired in the English Channel. Cyberattacks that have badly damaged Britain’s health care system and economy.

Britain and Russia are not at war. But a series of dangerous incidents over the past two years has pushed the two nuclear powers closer to open conflict than at any time since the height of the Cold War.

While Moscow has been accused of waging what’s known as “hybrid warfare” against the entire NATO alliance since 2014, the Kremlin seems to take its tactics a step further when the target is Britain, which it blames for helping prolong the war in Ukraine.

With Russian troops bogged down, and Ukrainian forces striking deep into Russia with drones and missiles, the question facing Britain’s defence establishment is how far Moscow may go with its hybrid warfare campaign − and whether it’s a prelude to a more direct confrontation.

Rescuers search for survivors as Kyiv mourns at least 30 killed in Russian attack

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been courting U.S. President Donald Trump – hoping he’ll help end the Ukraine war in Moscow’s favour – leaving Britain to take over from the U.S. as the main enemy in the eyes of the Kremlin’s spies and propagandists.

“We have terrible relations – and they’re going southwards,” said John Foreman, who served as Britain’s defence attaché in Moscow until 2022, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. “From the Kremlin’s perspective, we are their public enemy number one.”

Much of the animosity stems from the war. The Kremlin claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was close to accepting a peace deal on Moscow’s terms in the early weeks of the invasion but was dissuaded from signing it after a surprise visit to Kyiv by then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Mr. Zelensky has denied the story, but it remains a central narrative in Kremlin propaganda.

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Britain has since been one of Ukraine’s biggest backers, trailing only Germany in the dollar value of the military aid it provided last year, while also rallying European support for Kyiv as Mr. Trump seemingly started to lose interest in the war. London’s role prompted Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service to release a 2025 statement in which it accused “perfidious Albion” – a derogatory term for Britain first coined by Napoleon Bonaparte – of being “the primary instigator of global conflict.”

What may have been the first shots of the hybrid war were fired on June 16, when the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich fired in the direction of a yacht in international waters just south of the Isle of Wight. The retired British couple on board their yacht were frightened but uninjured.

U.K. military investigates after Russian warship fires warning shots near yacht in Channel

That incident occurred 48 hours after Royal Marines boarded and seized an oil tanker in the English Channel that was flying the flag of Cameroon but was believed to be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” of sanctions-dodging ships.

The most symbolic strike occurred last year, when fires were set at two properties and in a car belonging to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a string of arsons that Mr. Starmer called “an attack on democracy.” While two Ukrainian-born men were convicted in the case, London’s Old Bailey court heard they had been recruited and paid via the Telegram messaging app. The Financial Times and the BBC reported this month that the recruiters were based in Russia and aligned with a hacker group affiliated with the Kremlin.

Kremlin-linked hackers have also been blamed for an August, 2025, cyberattack that halted vehicle production for five weeks at Jaguar Land Rover, one of Britain’s largest employers, a setback that cost the British economy $3.5-billion. A cyberattack in 2024, targeting a provider to the National Health Service, saw the personal data of 33,000 patients stolen and caused months-long waits for blood tests.

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Experts believe the goal of Moscow’s hybrid warfare efforts against Britain and other NATO allies is to destabilize its enemies without having to fight an all-out war. In Britain – which is about to get its seventh prime minister in the 10 years since it voted to leave the European Union – the Kremlin’s agents may sense a target that’s ripe for the picking.

Britain’s Parliament has heard evidence of how Kremlin-controlled media and online bots pushed an anti-EU agenda ahead of the “Brexit” vote in 2016, though the meddling wasn’t seen as decisive to the result.

Nigel Farage, who co-led the Brexit campaign, was a frequent guest on the Kremlin-run RT television network and has long been accused of having a pro-Russia bias. Mr. Farage’s Reform UK party currently leads in most national opinion polls, despite the November conviction of Nathan Gill, his chief deputy in Wales, on charges of accepting money from a Russian agent. Mr. Gill was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

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Some believe the Kremlin hopes Mr. Farage will win the next election and take office with a different view of Mr. Putin and the war in Ukraine, just as Mr. Trump did in the U.S.

“Russia is obviously harmed by the political decisions made in the U.K., by sanctions, diplomatic isolation, etc. – and they obviously want that not to be the case any more,” said Helena Ivanov, an associate researcher at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based security studies institute.

Ms. Ivanov sees Russia running a misinformation campaign in Britain and other Western countries to convince voters that policies such as sanctions against Moscow and providing military support to Ukraine are not in their best interests. “If you persuade the voters that that’s true, and then they vote that way, you ultimately get the political outcome that you wanted and you didn’t have to engage in a full-blown war,” she said.

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On Tuesday, Mr. Starmer highlighted the threat posed by Russia as he announced a $28-billion increase in Britain’s defence spending, including purchases of fighter jets, nuclear submarines and a $9.5-billion investment in drones and autonomous weapon systems. Earlier, he said NATO intelligence suggested that Russia could be preparing to attack the alliance “as soon as 2030.”

Mr. Foreman dismissed such talk as hyperbole, noting that hybrid warfare is generally seen as a substitute for, rather than a step toward, open confrontation.

The bad news for Britain, he said, is that the hybrid attacks are likely to continue − and perhaps escalate − as the pressure mounts on Russia and its President. “Putin is a man who has this image of a master spy – so he likes to use espionage and subversive measures to target Britain and try to undermine it.”

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