Russia’s shadow war with us is just starting – be ready for trouble

The head of MI6 has warned that for Russia ‘the front line is everywhere’. We need to wake up to the dangers of a new wave of clandestine attacks, writes Chris Blackhurst

Shortly before Christmas, the new chief of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, made her first public speech since taking charge. She chose as her subject the multifaceted threat posed by Russia, warning of the growing danger from Vladimir Putin’s regime. “We are operating in a space between peace and war,” she said.

The recently appointed “C” said “the front line is everywhere”, explaining that Putin is provoking a new “age of uncertainty” by busily rewriting the unwritten rules of conflict. “The export of chaos is a feature, not a bug, in the Russian approach to international engagement,” said Metreweli.

This week has seen the cementing of the axis between the UK, France and Germany with the promise of troops on the ground to monitor peace in Ukraine, a move that is bound to antagonise Putin. Concerns about Russian retaliation are growing still further following the boarding of a tanker in Russia’s “shadow fleet” by US forces off the British coast. The involvement of the Royal Navy will have been noticed and noted in Moscow. The hostility continues to ramp up in intensity.

The picture Metreweli paints is frightening: a scenario not of overt military strikes, but of covert “grey zone” assaults from every angle. The spy chief did not go into detail. We are all aware of the existence of planned sabotage, assassinations, hacking, cyber crime and drone attacks. Such concepts are well aired and are firmly embedded in the public consciousness. Less familiar, however, according to security experts, is the notion of economic warfare. Key to this, to use their parlance, are non-state actors – not Russian diplomats or entities formally associated with the Russian state, but private individuals, organisations, movements and companies who secretly act in Russia’s interest.

Some are ideologically motivated, while others do it for money, frequently being paid in untraceable cryptocurrency, like Jan Marsalek. Austrian-born Marsalek was COO of Wirecard, the German payment processing firm that collapsed in 2020 after announcing that €1.9bn (£1.65bn) it supposedly held in cash did not in fact exist.

For almost a decade prior to its insolvency, Marsalek had been working for the Russian security agency, the GRU. His position at Wirecard gave him access to data and resources that were useful to the Russians. He used his seniority to develop pro-Russian links in Libya, and to encourage a flood of migration to Europe that was calculated to cause social and financial damage – all playing into Moscow’s hands.

After his exposure, following Wirecard’s collapse, Marsalek fled to Russia. In late 2023, Marsalek was named again as the coordinator of a Bulgarian spy ring operating in the UK.

Another example is petty criminal Dylan Earl, the ringleader in an arson attack on a warehouse in east London stocked with aid for Ukraine in March 2024. He was also recruited online by the Russian paramilitary organisation known as the Wagner Group.

More sophisticated still, and harder to crack, are the Russians or non-Russians working in the commercial field, in strategic industries critical to Europe’s defence and infrastructure, such as defence and energy, and acting in Russia’s interests, often under orders from the GRU or other Kremlin agencies. Security sources maintain that Moscow considers these actors useful as there is a degree of separation: deniability is fundamental to the strategy.

The difficulty of tracking such activity can be seen in the case of Alexander Kirzhnev. The Russian is wanted by the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court in Ukraine, having been accused in absentia of organising a fraud against Ukraine by using a bogus US company to fulfil an order for ammunition.

The Ukraine state-owned firm Artem placed a multimillion-dollar order for 152mm and 155mm shells with a supplier based in Florida. Advance payment was made. All seemed well: a US firm was helping Ukraine’s war effort, no problem there. The trouble was, the Florida company had no ability to fulfil the order.

By diverting precious Ukrainian cash, taking up their time and effort, and making them think much-needed military supplies were coming when they were not, Kirzhnev’s alleged actions – whether under instruction or not – epitomise Russia’s goals in the “grey zone”: deniable private-sector activity that moves the Kremlin closer to its strategic objectives, sowing uncertainty along the way.

But the efforts to maintain deniability are not always successful, and can unravel under scrutiny. In October 2022, Yuri Orekhov was one of five Russian nationals charged in New York over a global procurement scam. Orekhov and his companies were subsequently placed on the US Treasury Department’s sanctions list.

The allegations stated that the five were trying unlawfully to obtain US military technology and embargoed oil using a myriad of transactions involving shell companies and cryptocurrency. Key to this was the alleged use of a German-registered company to “smuggle hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from Venezuela to Russian and Chinese purchasers”, according to the US Department of Justice.

Following the discovery of the scheme by KleptoCapture, a task force of the US Department of State that was set up by Joe Biden to enforce sanctions, United States attorney Breon Peace explicitly tied Orekhov and the others to Russia’s interests in Ukraine, stating: “We will continue to investigate, disrupt and prosecute those who fuel Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, evade sanctions and perpetuate the shadowy economy of transnational money laundering.”

When we think of Russian aggression and attempts to sow discord among Western allies, we must expand our view of just how far the Kremlin will go, in all walks of life, to cause destruction and spread disquiet.

These cases clearly demonstrate something that the new MI6 head is evidently alert to: the extent of Russia’s murky “grey zone” network, and the damage Moscow can inflict on vulnerable targets using deniable actors. As the war in Ukraine approaches its fifth year and efforts to reach a peace deal continue, we can expect a ramping up of activity in this space. Britain and Europe need to be prepared. “C” has delivered her warning.