By Eric King-
Russia’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has rejected remarks by MI5 director General Andrew Parker that Russia is aggressively advancing its foreign policy.
“This is completely untrue, we cannot agree with it at all,” Peskov told journalists on Nov. 1.
His remarks were in relation to Parker’s interview with the UK Guardian, in which he said Russia was employing various tools including cyber attacks to push its aggressive foreign policy, Peskov said: “We have already commented numerous times on the alleged cyber attacks.”
“Until real proof is furnished, we will consider any statements by either the MI5 chief, or the United States vice president, or any other official as evidence-free and unsupported, so we cannot have any regard for these unsubstantiated statements,” said Peskov.
The Kremlin spokesman concurred with Parker on one point; namely that Russia is really ‘using its whole range’ of opportunities but, contrary to what he [Parker] said, all possibilities envisaged by international law to promote and defend its interests abroad.”
“Russia has always been doing this, being guided by the principles of mutually beneficial relations and seeking to build good-neighborly and mutually advantageous ties with all of its partners,” Peskov explained.
Parker had told the Guardian that Russia poses a growing threat to Great Britain since it is using all possible tools it has to “push it’s foreign policy abroad in increasingly aggressive ways – involving propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyber-attacks.”
And early today, it was announced that £1,9bn will be spent on improving technology against cyber attack threats coming from Russia. The M15 may indeed have reliable information to support their assertion, but in the absence of verifiable evidence, Dimitry Peskov is in principle right that there is no evidence to back the assertion against Russia.
In this age of heightened political tension between Russia and the West, it is much better for various governments to avoid potentially provocative assertions that can only serve to intensify the strain between Russia and the West. All efforts to counter potential attacks from any hostile sources should be pursued without necessarily pointing fingers without providing evidence for such allegations.