Why MI5 is so worried about Russia’s GRU

Ken McCallum, head of the Security Service (MI5), has warned of the serious threat to Britain posed by the Russian and Iranian intelligence agencies. McCallum said in a speech yesterday that the Russian GRU was on a mission to generate ‘sustained mayhem on British and European streets’, deploying ‘arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness’.

That the GRU is being highlighted demonstrates both how the threat to the UK is evolving, but also the changes underway in Russia’s intelligence agencies. Officially, since 2010 the GRU has been known as the ‘GU’, but everyone from Putin down still uses the old name. The GU, or Main Directorate of the General Staff, is Russia’s military intelligence service. It is a massive and sprawling empire, including not just the spies embedded as defence attaches abroad but hackers, spy satellites, analysts and the Spetsnaz special forces.

It was the GRU that was behind the attempted murder of defector Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, and the GRU that is believed to be behind the assassination of defector Maxim Kuzminov in Spain in February.