MI6 head calls on Russians to spy for UK

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The head of Britain’s MI6 appealed on Wednesday to Russians who are appalled by the killing in Ukraine to join forces with the UK’s foreign spy agency.

“I invite them to do what others have done this past 18 months and join hands with us,” Sir Richard Moore said in a rare public speech. “Our door is always open . . . together we will work to bring the bloodshed to an end.”

Moore, who was speaking from the British ambassador’s residence in Prague, likened the situation in Ukraine to the 1968 Prague Spring when the Soviet Union quashed liberalising reforms.

“There were many Russians in 1968 who saw the moral travesty of what was being done here,” Moore said. “Many Russians are [now] wrestling with the same dilemmas . . . as their predecessors did.”

He cited the mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group as “a real indication” of how the invasion of Ukraine “was bleeding back into the Russian body politic and potentially destabilising” the regime.

Moore’s second public speech since becoming head of MI6 in 2020 gave a tour d’horizon of how the British spy chief saw the world.

He singled out the rising power of China, a country to which Moore said “we now devote more resources . . . than anywhere else”.

Moore also explored what artificial intelligence meant for spycraft.

He argued that the “human factor” of his agents would become even more important in uncovering “the secrets that lie beyond the reach” of [AI’s] nets. He said his staff were combining their skills with AI to “to identify and disrupt the flow of weapons to Russia for use against Ukraine”.

Moore warned, however, that some adversaries would try to develop AI in reckless ways. It had already enabled a “blizzard of propaganda and disinformation” that had “opened up vast new terrains for fake news, blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality”.

“A significant part of our role [will be] to try and . . . detect, uncover, and then disrupt people who would like to develop AI in directions which are dangerous,” he said.

Moore said Russia’s military campaign had run out of steam and “there appears to be little prospect of the Russian forces regaining momentum”.

He said Ukraine’s counteroffensive was proving “a hard grind”, but he was “optimistic” it would succeed and that Vladimir Putin was “clearly under pressure”.

He called out Iran for fuelling the war in Ukraine by supplying Russia with drones and other weapons — a policy that Moore said “has provoked internal quarrels at the highest level of the regime in Tehran”.

He also accused Russia of using Wagner as a tool of imperialism in Africa, and that it offered “a Faustian pact” to leaders in the Central African Republic, Mali and “perhaps the contenders for power in Sudan or the new rulers of Burkina Faso”.

“Now they’ve had to watch the very mercenaries who they are supposed to trust, turning against their ultimate patron, Vladimir Putin,” Moore said. “If Russian mercenaries can betray Putin, who else might be betrayed?”

One area where Moore suggested he had little visibility over was the state of Putin’s relationship with Prigozhin, after the mercenary leader made what Moore called his “extended road trip from Rostov to Moscow”.

“Prigozhin started [that day] as a traitor at breakfast. He had been pardoned by supper, and then a few days later was invited for tea,” Moore said. “There are some things that even the chief of MI6 finds it a little bit difficult to try and interpret in terms of who’s in and who’s out.”