The Currency of People is Trust

International Centre for Defence and Security - Estonian Council on Foreign Relations at the Estonian Business School 13 May 2026

I gave this speech on the 13 May 2026. It is the third of four posts I am publishing as a series in which I set out why Britain, and Europe, have still not woken up to the danger we face after thirty years spent believing the Cold War was won and that peace would last for ever.

In this speech I reveal…

Why people — not platforms or hardware — are the true front line and therefore trust is the currency on which our survival depends

Why we are, in many ways, already at war, fought through the lies that divide our societies and corrupt our politics

Why Britain should stop lecturing the front-line states of the Baltics and start learning from them, helping to build a new Northern Alliance by sharing intelligence that this moment demands.

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Thank you very much indeed Marko, it’s a great pleasure to be with you again and to be back in Tallinn. Thank you for welcoming me, and as you mentioned our common service in Afghanistan, you remind me of one day standing on the flight line waiting for the helicopter that never comes, which is an experience most soldiers will share, and I was standing next to an Estonian Sergeant, this was in 2006 or 2007, and I said “First tour?” and he said “No, been here before”, I said “when was that?”, “eighty-eight” he said, “ok, well what was the difference?’, after a few moments of silence he said “well, we had more helicopters”.

But look, it is a huge pleasure to be here and I’m very grateful for the welcome that you’ve given me. I’m very proud to be supporting the International Centre for Defence and Security, this week, not just for the Lennart Meri Conference, but for all the other different events that you organise. You have in this city organised conversations to face the tough choices that confront us today and you’ve set out various ways of meeting them, so it’s a pleasure to be asked, and to be invited to speak today.

Now, I wanted to start by saying this is the third in a series of speeches that I have been giving in recent weeks because I believe that Britain, and indeed the whole of Europe, has not really woken up to the dangers that we face.

That is why I started at home, setting out the British military situation honestly, because Chinese intelligence gathering in the United Kingdom, Russian attacks on our connections in the seas and on land, and most importantly, the consequences of 30 years spent believing that we had won the Cold War and that peace now reigned eternal have finally come home and we must face the reality.

I listed Britain’s failures to invest, and I also looked at where the lessons apply more widely.

Last week at Stanford, I began to address how we respond. From San Francisco, you can imagine, the answer is always tech, of course it is. But it’s actually much more than that. It’s about the whole industrial might that must be brought to bear to resist aggression. It’s about the whole of society preparations needed to build up resilience, so that we can endure, and not just strike.

As I put it in California, it’s not just about armies, armies go on operations, it’s nations that go to war. Nations prepare, nations endure. That means industry, academia, in fact the whole of society, not just the military must prepare.

That brings me here tonight in Tallinn, and what I wanted to talk to you about – about people – because when we talk about society, that’s what we really mean, we mean people.

It is the area of our greatest vulnerability. The division between us and the lies that separate us. We are seeing our freedoms exploited every day to destroy the trust that holds us together, but too few of us are facing the reality of the challenge that our enemies are massing against us.

But here in Estonia you have faced that reality earlier and more actively than most.

Many of us, sadly, have chosen not to believe in the devil, but as we see every day in Ukraine, and particularly in the massacres of Irpin and Bucha, the devil is alive and walks among us. Evil exists and we need to be ready to fight. Something you have never forgotten.

About a decade ago I was talking to an Estonian friend about e-citizenship and the whole e-society that you have built. He said, “It means we will be ready for when the Russians next attack,” he said, “it will allow us to be a people without a country. They won’t be able to destroy us.”

Now, at the time I thought he was paranoid. Today, I think he was prepared.

What we have seen consistently not just under Vladimir Putin but under Russian rulers for centuries is the violent ambition of the tyrant. They have murdered millions and tortured more. Again and again we have seen a corrupt princeling in Moscow look with envy on the successes of the free nations of Europe and suffered the violence that has followed.

That’s the reality that you have always known, and in London and other capitals, we have grown far too comfortable and complacent in a way that you never did.

So I understand why so many here are exercised over the question of America’s pledge to NATO. Watching the current administration question their commitment to our shared defence is indeed very worrying. But are we truly focussed in the right place?

I ask that question because over the last 30 years, while the Americans have maintained their military, others have cut the cloth and hidden the gaps in their promises.

Britain, and others, have not paid their table stakes for decades but seen their promises be turned from weapons into words.

I wonder, is it the United States that is walking away? Or are they forcing us to face the reality of decades of self-deception? If it’s the latter, let’s face it, that is welcome.

Of course, that’s not true of you, and indeed it’s not true of many of your partners and allies. You have been carrying your share of the burden this whole time spending some 3.4 percent of GDP on defence today and committed to 5.4 percent from 2026 to 2029.

And your neighbours many of them have done the same:

Poland is at 4.5 percent already, rising to 4.8 percent next year.

Latvia is at 3.7 percent, and Lithuania is at 4, and they’ve committed to between 5 and 6 percent from 2026.

Then of course there is Finland. Outside the alliance until recently, Helsinki has never forgotten what it took to stop the Red Army and has never dropped its guard.

When they joined NATO, they didn’t just add to our security, they brought an attitude and approach we in Britain need to learn from. And along with Sweden, they shifted the alliance north, reminding me of the bonds we shared in the past under the Viking kings or the Hanseatic treaties.

Then we were expanding and trading. Today, we are protecting what we have built together.

So let’s look at it, let’s look at what is threatened.

Because for years now, Russia has been conducting warlike acts against us, trying to undermine our democracy and our freedom.

We have hidden behind diplomatic dances and weasel words because honesty would have forced us to make choices we wanted to avoid. Now personally, I’ve had enough of the obfuscation and evasion. It’s time to say it clearly: the Kremlin is at war with Europe and their allies in Beijing are helping.

Just look at their crimes:

In 2006, the FSB murdered Alexander Litvinenko in London using a chemical so toxic traces from it were later found at more than 40 sites across the city, including on the British Airways flight his killers flew in on.

In 2016, Russian military intelligence plotted to seize the Montenegrin parliament on election night, assassinate the Prime Minister, and install a pro-Russian government to halt the country’s accession to NATO.

In 2018, the GRU poisoned the Skripals with a nerve agent in Salisbury. The perfume bottle they left behind still contained enough to kill a mother of three. In fact, if it had been raining that night and the bottle had tipped into the sewer, it would have gotten into the water supply and killed thousands.

And in 2024, the Kremlin spent more than $200 million, the equivalent to around 1 percent of Moldova’s GDP, on interfering in the country’s presidential election and EU referendum. President Sandu has said her government has evidence that 150,000 votes were bought, with the target having been twice that number.

Now that’s not all. The same year, the GRU sent incendiary devices disguised as pillows through the DHL network. One caught fire in a warehouse in Birmingham, another at a hub in Leipzig. German intelligence told the Bundestag the only reason a cargo plane did not go down over Europe was because the flight was delayed.

That year, Germany faced more state-terrorism. United States and German intelligence operations disrupted a Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the chief executive of Rheinmetall, Europe’s largest producer of artillery shells. He was one of several European defence industry executives on a Russian target list.

The record here of course is just as serious.

In 2007, Estonia was the first NATO member subjected to a coordinated, state-directed cyber-attacks when three weeks of denial-of-service operations targeted your ministries, your banks, and your broadcasters.

And of course in 2014, we must not forget that Eston Kohver, an Estonian Internal Security Service officer, was dragged across the Russian border by FSB agents, and paraded on their state television, before being sentenced in a vastly unfair trial to 15 years in a penal colony.

Time and again we have seen how Russia violates our sovereignty and threatens our peace. Their imperial ambitions are not dead. Let’s face it, they’re not even sleeping.

But many have barely responded. Time and again, the alliance has barely moved. We expelled a few more diplomats. We imposed a few more sanctions. We issued a few more statements. Usually, Moscow barely even noticed and saw us as easy to push around.

They weren’t wrong. Too many of us have not been serious and worse, too many have been complicit.

In 2014, France’s Rassemblement Nationale took a loan from a small bank in Moscow, after European banks declined to lend to them. When the bank collapsed, the debt was passed to a Russian aviation company that the German Marshall Fund’s analysts have now linked to Russian intelligence. A French parliamentary committee subsequently found that the party had operated as a relay for Russia in French politics.

In 2024, Moscow so corrupted the Romanian elections that the first round of the presidential polls had to be annulled when their agents got an unknown candidate within touching distance of the presidency. Russia didn’t do that alone. It was a coordinated TikTok and Telegram operation with China’s hands all over this new online army.

They have been helped by useful idiots and corrupt co-conspirators. Former leaders of our nations who have betrayed us all, bowing, or in fact in Austria’s case curtsying, to our enemies and their money.

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined the boards of companies used by Putin not only to rob his people but to bribe ours. Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, abased herself before Putin at her wedding and now degrades herself propagandising for Russia.

In Britain too, sadly I have to confess, we have our own traitors. Shamefully, a British Member of the European Parliament and the former leader of the Reform party in Wales got 10 years in prison for spouting the Kremlin’s rubbish for cash.

They have taken their 30 pieces of silver. Dirty money has corrupted our politics and now sadly cryptocurrencies are making it harder to trace.

It would be easy to laugh these incidents off. To claim these failed politicians are simply echoes of a rather tawdry 1960s spy story. But the truth is actually much darker.

At the heart of each of these attacks is people, and the currency of people is trust. That’s exactly what Putin is targeting because that’s the centre of gravity for all of us, so the centre of gravity for all the operations prosecuted by Moscow. This is a sustained campaign across every avenue against the political integrity of our European democracies.

Millions to a party or to a politician here. Another denied, but let’s face it obvious, attack over there.

The spreading of division online and use of obvious lies, not because anyone is expected to believe them, but so that people believe there is nothing that is true and everything is to be doubted.

It is, let’s face it, unrelenting and it is conducted below the threshold at which we have so far displayed a willingness to respond. That’s our mistake, and we’re paying for it with more violence, more disorder, and more distrust.

We’ve answered the hard currency of force with the soft currency of words. We’ve pretended that international law binds us. The truth is, it doesn’t bind us all, it only binds we who obey.

Vladimir Putin hopes to convince our fellow citizens that we can’t trust each other, that our democracies can’t protect us, and that we’re all the same. You have to admit, he’s doing better than any of us would have liked.

But that’s why the truth matters. It sets us apart from Moscow.

It’s not just their rampant corruption, their brutality, and their hatred – of us and of course of each other; it’s that we know that cooperation, democracy, enterprise, and opportunity, are true and our freedoms are the values that we share from Vancouver to Tallinn and that we have built on them.

That’s what our alliance depends on.

So why don’t some pay their dues? Why are some slow in realising the threat?

To be honest, everything feels more pressing with proximity, but the cyber and information operations don’t care about distance. What matters is honesty and unity. When we stand together, we understand what matters, then we are ready to face them.

Talking of honesty, it brings me to a statement that I heard in the House of Lords by a British minister and to an apology I think needs to be made.

Last year, while witnessing the brutality of Russian troops raining down on Ukrainian civilians, Lithuania made a statement to protect its own children from that future. They announced that they would withdraw from the Ottawa treaty that prohibits the use of land mines. Now that can’t have been an easy decision because we all know that mines stay in the soil for decades and the risk to your own civilians’ lives, not just to the enemy soldiers’, is real. But when you see the pattern of rape, and murder, and torture, that has been rampant in Ukraine who can blame them, who can really blame them, for taking that risk?

Well, Baroness Chapman chose to do just that. And she was wrong. Britain should stand with our allies and understand the difficult compromises that frontline states must make to defend their homes and families. We are in absolutely no position to lecture them from the luxury of distance.

Instead, we must learn.

The war we see being fought in Ukraine is still not the war that we are preparing for. Not just in our defence ministries, but in our wider society. We are integrating the lessons too slowly and not alerting our people to the realities of modern conflict.

What Ukraine has achieved is not just a procurement story, or a military success but a lesson in national mobilisation.

Producing drones cheaply and at scale, redesigning them in weeks not years, with software updated by civilian programmers and factories in homes and barns across the country. Kyiv has shortened the feedback loop so the link between a frontline platoon commander and the start-up founder equipping him now runs in hours, and not in months.

And as with so many other things, the Baltic states, Sweden, Finland, and Poland have been applying these lessons faster than anyone else in NATO.

The Estonian defence industry indeed has expanded beyond recognition in three years. Companies like Milrem Robotics, Frankenburg Technologies and Threod Systems are now exporting capability to allies that a decade ago would, let’s face it, not even have been able to find Tallinn on a map.

And you are upgrading how you think about war.

Only last month, the Estonian government cancelled a €500 million programme to replace its infantry fighting vehicles and redirected that money to drones and air defence. You looked at Ukraine and drew the obvious conclusion.

Meanwhile, in London, it’s reported that the Ministry of Defence has pushed through an order for more helicopters when the Army wanted drones.

Now that’s simply not good enough. We need to be like Poland, and break old supply chains building newer, faster and getting what we need.

Poland went to Seoul for tanks because Berlin and Paris could not match Korean delivery times. The K2 line builds 180 tanks in 3 years. While the Leopard 2 line takes 5 years to build 50.

Mass at speed has always beaten the exquisite and slow. Re-engaging our homegrown industries is vital for resilience, but what matters most is people.

Again, we have lessons to draw.

And here I look at Sweden’s pamphlet titled ‘If Crisis or War Comes’ that was sent to every household – in fact it was sent twice. Like Taiwan’s version, it includes an important warning: don’t believe enemy rumours, and don’t repeat them. Again, they understand the power of lies. So does Putin and so does Xi.

Finland trains up its civilians through structured courses they can fit around their working lives. And you, in Estonia I know, have built the digital infrastructure to keep the basic functions of citizenship running even under occupation.

If your citizens don’t know where to go and what to do should the worst happen, then you’re not preparing for a crisis, you’re ensuring chaos.

That’s why honesty matters. If, as politicians, we hide the difficult choices we’re not being kind, we’re being cowards. Worse, we’re risking our children’s future, trading that for a quiet life for ourselves. And that’s wrong.

We need to make the case and find the resources, as you have done. Estonia is prioritising funding for defence over schools and hospitals, and I’m sure that’s a hard sell. There is not a single person in any country who wants anything other than a better outcome for their kids and care for their families. But pretending troubles will pass us by is simply not being honest.

As Kyiv shows, the price of conflict is so much higher than the cost of deterrence. Ukraine didn’t have the choice, but we do.

And the obstacle isn’t the British public, it’s our government.

Last year more than 170,000 young Britons applied to join the Army. Fewer than 10,000 made it through. We had space for more. We did not lack for interested, motivated young people. What we lacked for was the ability to get them through the system.

As Major General Nick Cowley, who is the Commandant to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, said: the claim that there’s a snowflake generation is absolute rubbish.

Well, he is right, except in Westminster where there are snowflake politicians. Not willing to tell the truth. Not willing to pay the political price and so pushing the cost onto our fellow citizens.

But perhaps even there, even there, we’re finally beginning to wake up.

The Armed Forces Bill currently before Parliament proposes to raise the recall age of service personnel to 65 and lower the threshold under which Reservists can be called up. Both are very welcome. But of course we need to go further.

Around 95,000 people are on a contingency list, ready to be called back to duty if needed, but you can bet it’s not up to date. The practice of staying in touch with our people, of knowing where they are and what they can still do, fell away after the Cold War ended.

The challenge we face, again, comes back to people.

How do you bring a nation together?

How do you prepare for a future we know is already more dangerous than our recent past?

That’s where I come back to the simple truth: it’s not armies that go to war, it’s nations. And as a nation, what can we do to be ready?

In Britain, national service is something of a dirty word. We have only forced men into uniform during a war, but what if we looked at the problem differently? What if we asked young people what they could do to help their families, their communities, their country?

Military service may not work, but public service is one way to bring the country together and ensure that we are ready. And the nature of modern warfare demands it.

With youth unemployment rising, AI taking jobs, or at least that is what is said, and many asking for work experience to show a future employer, a year or two of structured service in which a young person could choose the army, the health service, fire and rescue, agriculture, the local council or civil defence could make a huge difference.

The military would get the share that it needs, and the other services would get what they wanted. And in return the young person would come out with service-related perks, with skills, with a story, and most importantly with a clear role that they would be ready to step into should ever the crisis come, and of course they would have an understanding of their place in society.

It reminds me, I’m always struck when you meet Swedes who have done national service, they’ll always tell you about the night they spent guarding the Royal Palace and they all have a story for what happened, very often nothing, somehow they make it into a story. It’s moments like that that really unite a country, they are if you like the soft silk of shared stories.

Those connections don’t end at our borders, which brings me back to NATO.

Today, Britain leads the Joint Expeditionary Force, but that leadership has been let’s face it more in name than in fact. There are roughly a thousand British troops here in Estonia today, rising over the next five years to about 2,000.

But given the threat that we face, and the lesson in drones and mass that the Russians are sadly learning in Ukraine, these numbers aren’t enough of a deterrence.

A serious contribution would mean a continuous rotation of British troops, in greater numbers, through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, backed by a Reserve worthy of the name, conducting joint exercises, preparing for conflict and deterring that conflict where its fate hinges. It would mean being trained by teams from Ukraine, not sending training teams to Ukraine. And a revolution in the production of armaments at home.

After Bucha, we can never tolerate the price that the old NATO doctrine would put on our people. The old trip-wire concept, where we accept, or at least we did accept, that the Russian forces would overrun the Baltic states and we had a plan to liberate them in 180 days, that’s simply unacceptable today.

We must defend every inch of alliance territory from the first metre. That means our forces must be in place now, not promised for tomorrow.

To achieve that, we need to get better at predicting the future. That’s hard.

It’s much easier to steal it.

Defence demands intelligence and the networks to collect and share it. That once meant secrets and spies, today it actually often means open data and open minds.

Just take one example. In 2018, volunteers working from laptops at home, with no government help, identified the GRU officers responsible for the Salisbury poisonings. The information they used wasn’t classified. It was scattered across logs and telephone metadata, pulled from commercial services or bought on the dark web and sold by corrupt bureaucrats.

This is the democratisation of data accelerating the intelligence cycle as surely as the drone cycle is accelerated in Ukraine. What once required intelligence stations and moles is now within the reach of anyone with the imagination and the patience to use it.

The Buk launcher that shot down flight MH17 was matched to a photograph posted to social media. Its crews were tracked through fitness apps. The route the convoy travelled was reconstructed from dashcam footage uploaded by strangers who had no idea what their devices were recording information pointing to a Russia war crime.

Citizen journalism isn’t replacing intelligence services, but it is augmenting it. It’s a different skill and we need to catch up. Britain needs a new intelligence agency, not to replace the old but to build a new line of knowledge. A new eye on the future.

That brings me back to the core role of information. The need to keep it honest and the need to understand what is true.

Like Sweden’s crisis handbook, we need to know that information and lies are part of the battle. We see it online and we know that TikTok and other sites are created by and exploited by our enemies.

Since the attacks in 2007, Estonia is already ahead. The Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence here in Tallinn is formidable and NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga does fantastic work. But we can build on that. We can support startups like Bellingcat and encourage citizen investigators to expose corruption and complicity.

That’s why I would like to see a new agency in the United Kingdom: MI7, if you like. While MI5 focuses on protecting our home, and MI6 on understanding what’s going on abroad. MI7 would exploit the sinews that connect and integrate those plots helping to expose what is hidden often in plain sight.

In intelligence work, you’re always looking for a needle in a haystack. In the past, you had to rake up the straw. Today, frankly it’s all around us, the question is how do you sift it faster and better.

Britain should establish, urgently, this new intelligence agency dedicated to open-source intelligence collection and analysis. Because it needs a new culture, for a new era, and it demands a new institution to succeed.

The strength of the agency would be, again, in its allies, but by building on open source, we would be able to extend that alliance network much further.

The methods of Bellingcat have countered Russian lies. But working with Estonians and Ukrainians, and many other friends around the world, we would be able to build a new network integrated from day one with civilian researchers, journalists and academics.

While Five Eyes remains the core of our secret state, the new agency can open the agencies and build a Northern Network. A new Hansa, if you like, sharing the information that would once have kept the kings of Kyiv and London safe from the princes of Novgorod but now would keep us free. All fused into a single architecture, where the picture each of us has amounts to something sharper than what any of us could muster alone. Now I know that here, I’m building on very firm foundations.

Sadly while some of our partners in Europe have struggled to clean house from the history of Soviet occupation or indeed those who sympathised with them, you have always been very clear: there will be no spies in your house.

Which brings me to what I am asking of you, and demanding of us.

The Hansa worked because we all saw clearly that trade and security were connected. It worked because it secured the commons of the northern seas first, and conducted trade in goods second. It worked, for as long as it did work, because we all played our part.

So, to you, my friends, I ask that you keep speaking up. I am pleased when I hear you make the case in our capitals, not just yours. I’m pleased when I read op-eds that are written by people in your parliament, not just ours. I would like you to be omnipresent and irrepressible because your experience on the frontline is the lesson that we need to hear. We need to be woken from the long slumber that has captured us for far too long.

The United States is right that many of us don’t pay the share that we need to keep peace for us all. It is easy for some in London to dismiss that as bullying, or in some way to claim that President Trump is behaving unusually. It is much harder to wave away when it comes from our nearest allies bearing the brunt of the threat. So you have the moral authority, and I ask you, please, use it.

As you look across the river at Narva and stare into the darkness, please ask yourself: who do you want beside you? Then ask them to step up.

And now I turn to Britain. You will have heard woven through my words the actions that I’d like us to take. But let me just be very clear, first I would like us to be honest: we have tough choices today but they will only get harder tomorrow.

If we want to lead, if we want to deter, if we want to stand with our allies and defend the border NATO has given us the luxury of pushing more than a thousand miles away from our own shores, we need to pay the bill and think again.

We need to secure our home, by planning for the worst.

We need to see further into the future, by looking through the information that is all around us.

And we need to prepare our people, so that we can invest in the technology, the people and the skills to stand beside you watching across the Narva River and making sure the enemy doesn’t try to cross.

I said at the beginning: too many of us don’t believe in the devil, it’s easier to pretend that he’s not there. But none of us can afford the comforts of childhood any longer.

We are being attacked online and off. People are being murdered, our politics is being corrupted. This is the new battleground – our people. We are fighting the narratives that divide us and the lies that corrupt us.

This is war by other means.

We need a new Northern Alliance, a new intelligence agency and greater cooperation. Only if we get that new understanding of the threats that we face and the urgency that we need to deter them, will we wake up and see what is clear before us. Our allies are threatened, our lives are at risk and we need to rebuild the trust at home and abroad to protect ourselves.

It’s time to be serious again.

Thank you.