UK quiet on what Russian action would cross threshold

The Ministry of Defence has declined to say what Russian activities against British people, businesses and interests would be considered to sit above the threshold of armed conflict, telling Parliament that providing such detail would assist the UK’s adversaries.

Graeme Downie, the Labour MP for Dunfermline and Dollar, tabled two questions on 2 July asking the Defence Secretary to define the meaning of “sub threshold” in relation to Russian threats and offensive action against UK people and interests, and to set out what activities would not be considered sub-threshold. Defence minister Louise Sandher-Jones answered both on 7 July.

On the definition, the minister pointed to existing publications rather than offering the department’s own. “Recent publications, including the House of Commons Defence Committee ‘Defence in the Grey Zone’ report and the Strategic Defence Review, highlight the breadth and depth of threats posed by sub-threshold activity,” she said. “Russia remains the most pressing and immediate threat in this space, conducting malign sub-threshold activities which actively threaten the UK and our allies. States who operate in this way below the threshold of armed conflict are seeking to exploit every potential weakness in our societies and alliances to gain an advantage.”

On the question of which activities would sit above the threshold, the answer was a single sentence. “We cannot provide detail on how the MOD would respond to certain activities versus others as this would assist our adversaries,” the minister said.

The exchange leaves the term undefined in the government’s own words, with the department describing the character of sub-threshold activity and its principal practitioner while declining to state where the threshold itself sits or what would constitute crossing it. The questions go to a point of recurring debate in defence policy, since the language of sub-threshold and grey zone activity describes hostile acts calibrated to fall short of triggering an armed response, and the absence of a stated line is, on one reading, deliberate ambiguity that preserves a government’s freedom to respond, while on another it leaves adversaries free to escalate incrementally without consequence. Both readings featured in the Defence Committee’s grey zone inquiry to which the minister’s answer refers.

Downie has pressed the government repeatedly on the breadth of Russian activity against the UK.

Speaking to the UK Defence Journal this week after reporting that Russian hackers had stolen government login credentials, he set out a pattern spanning “attacks on the UK on land, through poisonings of British citizens and arson attacks on the Prime Minister’s car, in the air through drone incursions, at sea via threats to sub sea cables and now another cyber attack after involvement in the attack on JLR,” calling on the government to rapidly increase UK preparedness and make sure the public know the impact and costs of these attacks on their daily lives, so that the public “will then demand action to protect them from this ongoing conflict with Russia.”

The answers come in a week in which Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis told the Commons the UK is under daily attack from adversaries seeking to harm its society and prosperity, citing Russian threats in every domain including the multiple approaches to HMS Prince of Wales, and days after an International Institute for Strategic Studies report assessed that Russia has highly likely conducted a sustained drone campaign across Europe, including over British air bases, while acting with effective impunity.