“Russia is not the gravest threat” is John Kiriakou’s assessment of the inaugural policy speech by Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to head MI6, delivered in December 2025.
The speech
Kiriakou summarised it before disagreeing with it, and noted the service’s age in passing: “the MI6 is old. They I didn’t realize it was 116 years old. um according to the press, she’s the first woman to run MI6 and she gave a big policy speech and basically she went on and on and on about how the biggest threat to I guess the UK and to Europe in general is Russia and specifically it all comes down to the Russo Ukrainian war.”[1]
His first reaction was to the choice of subject rather than the argument: “I thought that was really kind of sad.” He noted she also covered artificial intelligence as both a threat and a tool, and read her as coming from the technical side.[1]
The rejection
Asked directly what he made of her analysis, Kiriakou gave the two-word answer twice. “not convincing. not convincing yes AI is a very big problem but you can’t say that Russia is the gravest threat to you know, freedom and democracy on the face of the earth. Where do you come up with that?”[2]
The grounds are material. “misuse of technology could be China could be. Russia is practically bankrupt. It has a population that is shrinking to the point where at its current birth rate there will be no Russians in a 100 years.” He accepted at once that the extrapolation is not a forecast — his interlocutor called it a funny factoid and Kiriakou did not defend it as literal.[2]
What he will not concede is the ranking: “I’m just not seeing Russia as this, you know, in yourface global immediate threat that has to No, I I just I’m not.”[3]
What he puts in its place
Asked whether any nation state qualifies, even China, Kiriakou moved the category rather than the answer. “I think that the real threats are going to be more amorphous like climate change which may not be specific nation state versus nation state.”[4]