UK Defence Secretary accuses Russia of planning to kill “thousands and thousands and thousands” of Britons
By
Robert Stevens
27 January 2018
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has ratcheted up Britain’s threats against Russia.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, published as its main front-page story Friday, Williamson said that Russia was spying on Britain’s critical national infrastructure and claimed, “The plan for the Russians won’t be for landing craft to appear in the South Bay in Scarborough, and off Brighton Beach.
“What they [Russia] are looking at doing is they are going to be thinking ‘How can we just cause so much pain to Britain?’ Damage its economy, rip its infrastructure apart, actually cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths, but actually have an element of creating total chaos within the country.”
The newspaper wrote, “Gavin Williamson told The Daily Telegraph that Moscow had been researching the UK’s critical infrastructure and how it connected to Continental power supplies with a view to creating ‘panic’ and ‘chaos.’”
Williamson added that Russia was willing to take actions “that any other nation would see as completely unacceptable.”
Without citing any evidence, he posed the question, “Why would they keep photographing and looking at power stations, why are they looking at the interconnectors that bring so much electricity and so much energy into our country.”
The newspaper noted this was a reference to “energy lines that link the UK to continental supplies and allow Britain to trade and share electricity and gas with neighbours.”
The UK, it said, “has four undersea interconnectors for electricity and three for gas, which provide energy to three million homes—a figure which will…