In his second major speech since being named in 2014 to head the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Alex Younger said Russia has a stance of "perpetual confrontation" with the West.
After the attack on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who betrayed dozens of agents to MI6, Britain’s allies in Europe and the United States took its side and ordered the biggest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War.
Britain identified the nerve agent deployed in the English town of Salisbury as Novichok, a highly potent group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet military in the 1970s and 1980s.