The former head of the British navy has warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risks spiralling into an all-out conflict with the Western defence bloc.
Admiral Lord West, the ex-First Sea Lord, warned that as a result, the UK was effectively already at war with Putin‘s country.
Speaking to the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast, Lord West said: ‘It’s quite difficult to see how one’s going to get out of this [conflict] because one doesn’t want a full war between NATO and Russia.
‘[Russia] would lose it – and the danger with them lost it is, would they then make that stupid mistake of going nuclear?’
NATO’s former secretary general, Lord Robertson, who appeared on the same podcast, starkly warned: ‘We are under-prepared, we’re under insured, we’re under attack and we’re not safe’.
He pointed to increasing threats made to critical digital infrastructure as evidence of this.
‘You wouldn’t tell that from Parliament. You wouldn’t tell that from people walking around the streets. But we are under attack in the cyber world.
Admiral Lord West (pictured, right) and Lord Robertson (pictured, left) both spoke on the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast
‘You could say it’s just a coincidence that all of these cyber-outages have taken place in the last few weeks, but they can’t all be coincidental.
‘The organisation of sabotage right across the continent of Europe has undoubtedly been organised by the GRU, the Russian military’.
Lord Robertson also pointed to the fact that Moscow is increasingly outsourcing its alleged hacking operations to freelancers.
‘They can’t do it themselves. So they are now contracting out, a good capitalist principle, to organised crime… Our undersea cables, which carry 99 percent of all the data we use, are vulnerable and they’re watching them and, in some cases, attacking them’.
He warned that when critical infrastructure is hacked and taken down, British citizens will inevitably demand answers: ‘When the lights go out, and the hospitals close down, and the data centres melt… people are going to say “why did you not do something about it?”‘
Last month, Russian hackers stole hundreds of sensitive military documents containing details of eight RAF and Royal Navy bases as well as Ministry of Defence staff names and emails – and posted them on the dark web.
In what has been described as a ‘catastrophic’ security breach, cybercriminals accessed the cache of files by hacking a maintenance and construction contractor used by the MoD.
The ‘gateway’ attack – which targeted third party the Dodd Group – allowed cyber gangsters to circumvent the almost impenetrable cyber defences used by the Armed Forces.
US Air Force F-35 stealth jets are pictured last year at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, where sensitive information has been disclosed about to Russian hackers
US nuclear bombs are also believed to be housed in RAF Lakenheath, which is pictured in this aerial view
The MoD said it was investigating the enormous data and security breach, believed to have been carried out by Russian group Lynx.
Leaked documents seen by the MoS disclose information about a number of sensitive RAF and Navy bases, including RAF Lakenheath, in Suffolk, where the US Air Force’s F-35 stealth jets are based and their nuclear bombs are believed to be housed.
Other bases include RAF Portreath – a top-secret radar station that forms part of Nato‘s air defence network – and RAF Predannack, now home to the UK’s National Drone Hub.
Details of contractors’ names, car registrations and mobile numbers, as well as MoD personnel’s names and email addresses, have also been uploaded. Some documents are marked ‘Controlled’ or ‘Official Sensitive’.
