Britain’s defence minister warned that Russia was looking to damage the British economy by attacking its infrastructure, a move he said could cause “thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths”, The Telegraph newspaper reported. Relations between Russia and Britain are strained.
Prime Minister Theresa May last year accused Moscow of military aggression and in December, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said there was evidence showing Russian meddling in Western elections.
Britain has also scrambled jets in recent months to intercept Russian jets near the United Kingdom’s airspace.
“The plan for the Russians won’t be for landing craft to appear in the South Bay in Scarborough, and off Brighton Beach,” Defence Minister Gavin Williamson, tipped as a possible successor to May, was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.
“What they are looking at doing is they are going to be thinking ‘How can we just cause so much pain to Britain?’. Damage its economy, rip its infrastructure apart, actually cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths, but actually have an element of creating total chaos within the country.”
Williamson said Russia was looking at ways to attack Britain. “Why would they keep photographing and looking at power stations, why are they looking at the interconnectors that bring so much electricity and so much energy into our country,” he was quoted as saying. “If you could imagine the domestic and industrial chaos that this would actually cause. What they would do is cause the chaos and then step back.”
“This is the real threat that I believe the country is facing at the moment,” he said.
The Russian defence ministry said Williamson’s comments showed he had lost his understanding of what was reasonable, RIA news agency reported.
“It is likely he has lost his grasp on reason,” RIA quoted ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov as saying.
Meanwhile experts have accused the defence secretary of scaremongering.
Experts said the lights were unlikely to go out if the electricity interconnectors, which supply about 5% of UK power, were somehow cut off. “It does sound a bit like scaremongering really. If you take out one interconnector it’s clear the UK can survive. We saw that last year with the one to France,” said Jonathan Marshall, energy analyst at the ECIU thinktank, referring to a major power cable to France running at half capacity after it was damaged by a storm.
Even if all four power lines were disrupted simultaneously, it is unlikely supplies to homes would be affected. “There’s more than enough capacity in the UK,” he said.
John Feddersen, the chief executive of Aurora Energy Research, agreed. “Electricity is not a major problem, we’ve got a decent amount of capacity. No house lights are going to go out,” he said.
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