Russia poses a significant and persistent threat to the UK and to Atlantic security, Defence Secretary John Healey told the House of Commons.

Answering questions on the level of threat posed by Russia, Healey said Vladimir Putin’s illegal war against Ukraine was now in its fifth year and that Russia was conducting hostile activity against the UK and other NATO allies on an almost daily basis. “Russia conducts hostile cyber-activity, spreads disinformation and carries out sabotage against the UK and many other NATO allies almost daily,” he said, adding that European security started in Ukraine. In response to recent Russian attacks, he said he had directed that UK deliveries of air defence systems to Ukraine be accelerated, and that he would chair the next meeting of the 50-nation Ukraine Defence Contact Group at NATO headquarters this month to step up the military aid provided to Kyiv.

Pressed by the Labour MP for Glasgow South, Gordon McKee, on whether the government would do more to communicate the scale of Russian hybrid warfare to the public, Healey said the threat needed to be better understood by both Parliament and the public. “The Russian threat against the UK is real and rising, and it is important for the public and Parliament to understand that,” he said. He pointed to disclosures he had made over the past year as part of that effort, including revealing that the Russian spy ship Yantar had been monitoring British critical undersea infrastructure and exposing what he described as a month-long covert Russian submarine programme in and near UK waters.

Healey closed his answer with a direct message to the Russian president. “I say to Putin: we see you; we will expose you; and we will not stand for you targeting the UK,” he told MPs.

The exchange was prompted in part by a warning the previous week from the director of GCHQ, who used an annual lecture to describe the UK as being relentlessly targeted by Russian aggression. McKee said it was well established among security experts that Russia was waging hybrid warfare but that this was not well understood by the public, a gap he argued mattered because deterring such attacks required significant investment and, at some point, trade-offs.

The Labour MP for Altrincham and Sale West, Connor Rand, pressed the case for closer cooperation with the European Union, arguing that British leadership on Ukraine had placed the UK in the firing line of an increasingly desperate Putin. Healey said the government was right to seek a closer relationship with the bloc from within what he called a “NATO first” framework, citing the security and defence partnership signed with the EU last year. He added that the Prime Minister had said the UK was looking to join the European Union’s Ukraine loan scheme, allowing it to provide more aid to Kyiv backed by British industry.

Hybrid warfare is the use of methods below the threshold of open armed conflict, among them cyber attacks, sabotage, disinformation and interference with infrastructure, intended to weaken an adversary while remaining hard to attribute and to deter. The Yantar, an oceanographic vessel widely assessed to be used for intelligence-gathering, has been tracked near undersea cables and pipelines in waters around the UK and northern Europe, part of the heightened concern across NATO over the vulnerability of seabed infrastructure that carries power, data and gas.