Fiona Hill, former Russia advisor under Trump’s first term, and member of the Council of Foreign Relations, commented in an interview with London’s The Guardian, that “Russia is at war with Britain, the U.S. is no longer a reliable ally, and the U.K. has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient.”
Hill is one of three reviewers of the new “Strategic Defense Review” for 2025, produced by the U.K. Ministry of Defense, along with Lord Robertson, a former NATO secretary general, and Sir Richard Barrons, a retired general.
“‘Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,’ Hill said, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as a starting point to Moscow becoming ‘a dominant military power in all of Europe.’
“As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already ‘menacing the U.K. 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.’
