ST. ANDREWS, Scotland—The head of the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service warned Russia it would pay for hostile acts carried out on British soil as he blamed tactics employed by the Kremlin that had created a state of “perpetual confrontation” with Britain and its allies.
In a rare public address, Alex Younger, head of the spy agency also known as MI6, launched a broadside against Russian aggression, including the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury earlier this year, cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns.
The U.K. is better placed than most countries to deal with such threats, Mr. Younger said, because of its allies, values and institutions. The U.K. and its allies would seek to make Russia pay for malign activity, while following U.K. law and values, he added.
“I urge Russia or any state intent on subverting our way of life not to underestimate our determination and our capabilities, or those of our allies. We can do this to any opponent at any time,” Mr. Younger told the audience at St. Andrew’s University, his alma mater.
The U.K. has described in detail to allies how operatives from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, visited the country in March in an attempt to murder a former Russia intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal with the deadly nerve agent Novichok. Moscow denies involvement in the attack, which left Mr. Skripal and his daughter in hospital and another woman dead.
Afterward, Britain coordinated an unprecedented international expulsion of Russian diplomats—whom the U.K. says were intelligence officers. The expulsion, London says, degraded Russian intelligence capabilities.
Mr. Skripal had come to the U.K. in an American-brokered spy exchange and been pardoned by the Russian president. Asked whether his service had done enough to protect the former spy, Mr. Younger cast doubt on future spy swaps. “To the extent we assumed that [pardon] had meaning, we will not be making that assumption again,” he said.
Mr. Younger suggested U.K intelligence had exploited new technologies to expose the Salisbury attackers as working for Russia. “Bulk data, combined with modern analytics make the modern world transparent, a fact which contributed to GRU embarrassment after the Salisbury attack,” he said.
The U.K. and its allies would seek to attach costs to such behavior in the future, Mr. Younger added.
“Our intention is for the Russian state to conclude that, whatever benefits it thinks it is accruing from this activity, they are not worth the risk,” he said during only his second public address since he took over the service in 2014.
Mr. Younger said cyber intelligence was the fastest-growing department at MI6, and the service was trying to make malign activities in that field have negative consequences for those carrying them out. He said the U.K. blamed the Russian government for the NotPetya attack in June 2017 against Ukraine, which also affected the U.K.
However, even though Russia sought to destabilize the U.K. and its allies, the U.K. wouldn’t respond in kind, he added. “We do not seek an escalation. If we see a change in Russian behavior, we will respond positively.”
Mr. Younger, who is a 30-year veteran of MI6, told the audience he had operated for the agency in the Western Balkans, under a false identity, and in Afghanistan.
Write to Stephen Fidler at stephen.fidler@wsj.com
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