Starmer lacks leadership on cyber defence – and it suits Putin, says ex-MoD boss ...Middle East

Sir Keir Starmer lacks the leadership to keep Britain safe against Russian attacks in cyberspace, a former government defence chief has said, warning that we must “must wake up” to the threat.

Major General Jonathan Shaw, former head of the Defence Cyber Security Programme at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), accused the Prime Minister of falling short of implementing the nationwide cyber defence strategy laid out in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), even as the Kremlin ramps up hybrid warfare tactics to destabilise the UK.

“He hasn’t done it at all,” Shaw told The i Paper. “It just shows to me either he doesn’t believe what he signed up to, or he doesn’t believe people are particularly interested and he lacks the leadership to make it happen, which suits the Russians.”

Shaw also warned that the UK’s vulnerability to Russian threats has grown since Donald Trump appeared to water down America’s commitment to European security after the US downgraded Russia as a national threat this month.

Cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and the deployment of vessels around UK territorial waters are among the “hybrid” or “grey-zone” warfare tactics employed by Russia in recent decades.

The tactics have increased markedly in Britain since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The i Paper has revealed that this year alone the Kremlin has used conventional cargo ships to launch drones over European military bases, and transport alleged spies into the UK to visit military sites and crucial infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy has repeatedly been forced to shadow Russian vessels suspected of gathering intelligence around Britain’s territorial waters, while businesses have been subjected to targeted attacks.

Among them was M&S, whose profits were nearly wiped out after a cyberattack believed to be linked to Russia.

UK must take Russian threat ‘very seriously’

Shaw told The i Paper the Kremlin was “deliberately engaging in sub-threshold warfare” to undermine European countries without instigating a military response.

“Hybrid warfare is an extreme level of inter-state competition but using a much broader set of tools than just the military,” he said.

Shaw explained that attacks using “sub-threshold tools” do not breach Article 5 of the Nato treaty, which stipulates that an armed attack against one member of the alliance is considered an attack against all, obliging other members to respond accordingly.

He said saboteurs acting on behalf of Moscow “are trying to cause as much damage as they can without triggering a huge response, and I think they’ve been quite successful in that”.

Shaw pointed to the example of a series of Russia-linked cyberattacks which crippled Estonian banks, government agencies and media outlets in 2007, virtually bringing the country to a standstill.

“The attack on Estonia in 2007 did not trigger Article 5,” he said.

Shaw urged the British public to heed warnings issued by the MI6 head Blaise Metreweli and Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, about the threats posed by the Kremlin.

Hybrid warfare is “not how we traditionally conceive of war, but it is an activity that has objectives that are war-like”, he said.

“Those warnings, we the Great British public, should take very, very seriously, because it does demand a whole-of-nation response.”

US ‘acting like an enemy’

The US National Security Strategy, published this month, claimed that Europe faced “civilisational erasure”, adding that on its current trajectory “the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less”.

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The 33-page document warned of “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence” across Europe.

Meanwhile, the document downgraded Moscow as a national security threat and laid out a plan for the US to manage the continent’s “relations with Russia”, which “will require significant US diplomatic engagement”.

This would create economic and “strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass” and “mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states”, the document read.

Asked whether the UK can no longer rely on Trump as a military ally, Shaw said: “Absolutely.”

He said: “Read the National Security Strategy of the United States. What [US Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Adviser] Stephen Miller wrote in there was pretty clear. He actually sees Europe as a threat. It’s extraordinary.

“Indeed, the only [region] that the National Security Strategy says that America is going to try and influence internally is Europe.

“He’s going to try and literally interfere in our politics to ensure that a certain strand of politics takes precedence. That is extraordinary. These are not actions of a friend, it’s the action of an enemy.”

Russia functions by ‘rule of power, not rule of law’

To understand the Kremlin’s intentions, Shaw said “you need to go back and see the whole context in which Russia operates”.

He said: “The way I look at Russia is that its culture is still very top-down [and it functions under the] rule of power, not rule of law. It hasn’t moved on much since the time of the tsars, in many ways.”

Citing Russian philosophical schools of thought that prioritise the collective over the individual, Shaw added: “You look at the way they treat their soldiers, and nothing’s changed since the tsars ruled Russia. Individual humans are expendable under the Russian system.”

Shaw went on to say that “Russia is ill-suited to compete in a capitalist world. It actually finds it very difficult to compete with the West, on the West’s terms.

“So instead of focusing on making itself better and trying to catch up with the West, which it can’t do, what it seeks to do is prevent [countries] around it looking much better than it.”

Pointing to Ukraine’s aspirations to join the EU in the lead-up to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Shaw said the Kremlin could not accept one of its neighbours having a “better political and economic system than Russia does”.

He went on to cite the philosophy of Alexander Dugin, an extremist, right-wing Russian theorist dubbed “[Vladimir] Putin’s brain”, who has advocated for the Kremlin to launch a campaign of “disruption in the West”.

“You’ve seen the results ever since,” Shaw said. “[Hybrid warfare] is not a campaign to try and make Russia look better, it is a campaign to make the West look worse, it is trying to undermine the West.”

We shouldn’t be ‘fooling ourselves’ over Russia-Ukraine deal

Shaw also cast doubt on a prospect of a peace deal in Ukraine being achieved in the near future.

“The Russian culture of sovereignty means that no sovereign – and Putin is a sovereign – is constrained by anything. If you are sovereign, nothing constrains you – no law, no rules, nothing. You are the law.

“That’s very much the way Putin sees the world – he is the law.

“What that means is that when you strike a deal with Russia, the only deal that makes any sense is one that you can enforce when Russia breaks it – because they will, they will break it in the end, when it suits them.

“The only reason they wouldn’t is because you have the strength to stop them breaking it or to reimpose the deal, should they break it.”

Shaw pointed to two additional reasons for Russia to continue its war against Ukraine. The first was that “the wartime economy, despite all its problems, rather suits Russia.

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“It is a command economy. It is top-down driven, rather an entrepreneurially driven. So I think the wartime economy rather suits Russia.”

What is “more worrying for Putin is that the history of Russian soldiers returning from the front and going back home is not good”, Shaw said.

He used the examples of the Russian Revolution of 1905, which erupted as soldiers returned from the Russo-Japanese War, as well as revolts that followed the First World War and Afghan–Soviet War.

“I think one thing Putin is really scared of is declaring an end to the war, bringing a million soldiers back home and trying to reintegrate them into Russian society, because such is the brutality of the way the Russians have treated their soldiers, such is the brutality of Russian military culture, that trying to reintegrate them back into what you might call normal civil society is not going to happen.

“Already there are stories coming out of Russia of returning soldiers causing mayhem back in their hometowns.

“So, from Putin’s point of view, both the economic structure and [the question of] what you do with the soldiers in Russia are two strong motivations to keep this war going.”

Shaw said “we would be fooling ourselves if we expected a peace deal to happen”.

“I think we are in the state of perpetual conflict, which is why in the West, we need to prepare ourselves for a return to defence budgets similar to – if not bigger than – during the Cold War, because now we have the added reality that the United States is not playing in to the defence of Europe any more.

“We need to factor that into consideration. We are facing a very different future.”

‘Britain must wake up’

In his final warning to the British public, Shaw said the UK must “wake up” to the threat posed by Russia and make security the leading principle of government.

“In Britain, we’re sufficiently far from the front line for it to all feel a bit abstract and distant – but it isn’t,” he said.

“If we have any values left, then we need to be supporting [Russia’s neighbours who are threatened by Putin] because we do not know where this is going to end up.”

Shaw added: “The only thing to say is that Britain needs to wake up. Britain needs to take the SDR and the national security strategy seriously.

“This needs to be the organising principle of government from now on, because all this focus on welfare and pensions and all the rest of it – those things can only exist if you’ve secured yourself, secured your economic and political way of life.

“It’s about security first, and everything else follows from that.”

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A Government spokesperson said: “National security is the first duty of this government. That is why we are actively closing the gaps left by the previous decade.”

The SDR also laid out plans to establish the Cyber and Electromagnetic (CyberEM) Command, designed to unify the UK’s cyber, electromagnetic, and information operations under a single umbrella.

“Since the SDR, we have stood up the new CyberEM Command with £1bn of investment and introduced the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. We are also dismantling threats at source, recently sanctioning the Russian ‘Media Land’ network,” the spokesperson added.

“This requires a whole-of-society effort and we are engaging business and academia to build resilience. We have blocked almost 1 billion attempts to access malicious sites and scams.

Major-General Jonathan Shaw works as an international relations and geopolitics speaker and is represented by the Motivational Speakers Agency.

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