The Atlantic Bastion

The new Syrian president is having to tread on difficult territory as many of the jihadists aren’t happy with his dealings – in general, there is a sense of some Islamic resurgence,” says Dr Antonio Giustozzi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute...Giustozzi also argues that because of the tight weapons controls in Britain, the kind of Bataclan-style armed “spectaculars” that might attract Isis wannabees is difficult.

Dr Hüsch admitted that there are many Russian and Chinese actors targeting both public and private UK infrastructure. Pointing to the cyber attacks on M&S and Jaguar Land Rover this year, she said: "This illustrates how vulnerable the UK private sector still is, and the private sector runs a lot of the UK critical national infrastructure.’ She warned that the most vulnerable sectors are hospitals and clinics, schools and also supermarkets.

I think there was a desire on the Russian side to show that Russia is not isolated, it still has allies and friends, and this is a message that they’ve always wanted to push. India has been a very important part of that... And then the Russians want to secure long term sales for their defence industry, because they have put their defence companies into eight to 10 years of debt and forced them to invest their own money into expanding production capacity, when they can only make 2.8% profit selling to the Russian government during the war. So, they need customers after the war. Otherwise, a lot of these businesses are going to collapse and the Russians suffer an economic shock. So, the Russians are trying to lay this foundation to secure their economy and their military industrial base. On the Indian side, I think the government will have wanted to message the Americans and others, that, ‘we have these relationships’, that they’re important and that ‘we have options’ and that ‘you can’t just coerce us...But there wasn't a big public announcement about weapons and so on. I think there probably were more substantive conversations held in private but not announced. And I suspect that is because officials didn’t want to antagonize the US."