Russia is at war with US, warns defence adviser

Russia is at war with Britain; the US is no longer a completely reliable ally, and the UK must respond by becoming more cohesive and resilient, according to one of the three authors of the strategic defence review.

- Dan Sabbagh

Fiona Hill, the White House's former chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump's first term who originally comes from County Durham, made the remarks in an interview with the Guardian. "We're in pretty big trouble," Hill said, describing the UK's geopolitical situation as caught between "the rock" of Vladimir Putin's Russia and "the hard place" of Donald Trump's increasingly unpredictable United States.

"Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we had probably hadn't fully anticipated," Hill said, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as a starting point for Moscow becoming "a dominant military power in all of Europe".

As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already "menacing the UK in various different ways," she said, citing "the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they're putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables."

The conclusion, Hill said, was that "Russia is at war with us".