At the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday evening, 22 September 2026, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced a National Centre for Information Defence, intended to detect, attribute and disrupt Russian state information attacks and strengthen national resilience. Burnham said Russian campaigns reached into people’s homes and distorted how they saw their country and communities.
Burnham told the UN assembly that Britain and its allies faced an “industrial-scale assault” on the information environment from hostile actors, with Russia as its chief author. He said the Kremlin spends around £1.3 billion each year manipulating information.
Russian agencies have copied the branding of 28 British organisations, including universities and the BBC. The methods include bots, fake websites and forged branding used to spread lies and disinformation.
The present concern has a longer history. Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of Russia’s FSB security service, died in London in November 2006 after being poisoned with polonium-210. He had met Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun at the Millennium Hotel on 1 November 2006, and died three weeks later. British investigators identified Lugovoy as responsible for the poisoning.
The Litvinenko Inquiry concluded that the operation was probably directed by the FSB. It found that Nikolai Patrushev, then head of the FSB, and Vladimir Putin probably approved it.
The European Court of Human Rights later found Russia responsible for Litvinenko’s assassination.
In 2018, two GRU officers arrived in Britain carrying the nerve agent Novichok, leading to an attack on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian agent who collapsed on a bench in Salisbury.
Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It coincided with a major escalation of Russian hybrid attacks across NATO territory.
The scale of such activity has been recorded by several research bodies. ICCT and GLOBSEC logged 151 Russian hybrid attack cases through February 2026. CSIS counted 3 Russian attacks in 2022, 12 in 2023 and 34 in 2024.
Burnham said the government had evidence that Russian agencies tried to interfere with the 2019 General Election.
The activity cited by officials and researchers reaches beyond Britain. Drone incursions into Romania have tripled this year, while Russia’s GPS-spoofing antennae in Kaliningrad have grown from 3 to 36.
Moscow is betting on a winter strike campaign using jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles. BBC Verify, citing Ukraine’s military, reported that jet-powered Geran drone attacks rose from 350 in June to 1,600 in July and 2,800 in August.
Danish intelligence expects hybrid attacks to become more frequent and more consequential. The Institute for the Study of War, meanwhile, has described Russia’s net battlefield gains in recent months as near zero.
The new centre is Britain’s institutional response to Russian state information attacks, after years in which the threat described by officials has included poisonings, chemical weapons attacks, digital deception and attempted political interference.
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