Indeed. The UK, as well as Germany and the U.S are countries that Russia has named as ones to specifically focus on.
There are ways to wage war outside of military action. This was a tactic of the Soviet Union as well. The west does it, but not on the scale that Russia does - Russia does have the advantage here, and they’ve had a lot of success. The west is very much on the back foot. An outside threat tends to unite people against the common enemy, but sow enough internal discord and you can get a people to turn on each other, and destroy themselves from within.
Again, I don’t believe that nuclear war will happen. It’s useful to threaten to inspire panic (and sow discord), but imo it isn’t something that anyone actually wants.
I suspect the escalation now may be, at least in part, to help Trump tbh. He’s positioned himself as the peaceful President to be, as someone that isn’t going to continue to fund an unpopular proxy war. A Trump administration is around the corner, and and dropping support for Ukraine/giving Russia what it wants is something that can be framed as ‘Trump saves the world from nuclear destruction!’. This will play well with a fearful public, and drown out any criticism of this particular policy.
https://www.marshallcenter.org/en/publications/security-insights/active-measures-russias-covert-geopolitical-operations-0
“Aktivnye meropriyatiya, “active measures,” was a term used by the Soviet Union (USSR) from the 1950s onward to describe a gamut of covert and deniable political influence and subversion operations, including (but not limited to) the establishment of front organizations, the backing of friendly political movements, the orchestration of domestic unrest and the spread of disinformation. (Indeed, the Committee for State Security [KGB]’s Service A, its primary active measures department, was originally Service D, meaning disinformation.)
In many ways, active measures reflect the wartime mentality of the Soviet leadership, as similar tactics were used by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, but much less frequently thereafter. For the KGB, however, active measures increasingly became central to its mission abroad in the postwar period, something made explicit by then–KGB chair Yuri Andropov in his Directive No. 0066 of 19821 Tellingly, the KGB’s official definition of “intelligence” was “a secret form of political struggle which makes use of clandestine means and methods for acquiring secret information of interest and for carrying out active measures to exert influence on the adversary and weaken his political, economic, scientific and technical and military positions.”2
Such practices became less common during Gorbachev’s reform era and then in the chaotic 1990s, in part because of a desire to improve relations with the West and in part due to the collapse of Soviet and then Russian covert networks abroad. However, under President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s foreign intelligence services were restored to their old levels of funding and activity, and early hopes of a modus vivendi with the West soon foundered, hampered by unrealistic expectations and mutual suspicions. By the mid-2000s, active measures were no longer confined to the immediate neighborhood of the post-Soviet “Near Abroad” countries, but were again being seen as a central component of Moscow’s wider strategy. This change reflected a broad shift in strategic perspective best encapsulated by Alexander Vladimirov, a retired major-general who then chaired the military experts’ panel at the Russian International Affairs Council, an influential think tank close to the Russian Presidential Administration (AP). In 2007, he wrote that “modern wars are waged on the level of consciousness and ideas” and that “modern humanity exists in a state of permanent war” in which it is “eternally oscillating between phases of actual armed struggle and constant preparation for it."3”