Britain is already at war with Russia and can no longer rely on the United States as a stable ally, the former top US Russia expert Fiona Hill told The Guardian in an interview. 

The well respected and former advisor to President Donlad Trump on Russia, Hill was one of the three authors of the UK’s recent strategic defence review. Speaking to, Hill described the UK’s position as precarious and called for urgent national cohesion in response.

“We’re in pretty big trouble,” Hill said, portraying the UK as caught between “the rock” of an increasingly hostile Russia and “the hard place” of Donald Trump’s volatile US. A dual national who served as the White House’s chief Russia adviser during Trump’s first term, Hill described the moment as “a major pivot point in global affairs”.

Hill said Moscow now viewed the war in Ukraine as the start of a campaign to re-establish military dominance in Europe. “Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,” she said. Citing poisonings, assassinations, cyber-attacks, sabotage and threats to undersea infrastructure, she concluded: “Russia is at war with us.”

Hill has warned of such risks since 2015, when she co-authored a book on Vladimir Putin. “We said Putin had declared war on the west,” she said. “He obviously had, and we haven’t been paying attention to it.” She argued that the Russian president views the conflict in Ukraine as “part of a proxy war with the United States”, and had drawn support from China, North Korea and Iran based on that framing.

Hill warned that Britain should not expect the same security guarantees from Washington as in the past. “The UK is having to manage its number one ally,” she said, cautioning that the goal was to avoid a rupture. Trump, she added, “is not an administration, it is a court” – a reference to what she characterised as a transactional leadership style driven by personal interest.

While Hill acknowledged Trump’s “special affinity for the UK” due to family ties and admiration for the royal family, she expressed concern about the spread of US-style populism in Britain. “The same culture wars” could take root, she said, noting that Reform UK had made recent electoral gains. She warned against imitating efforts like Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which she linked to mass layoffs.

Britain’s response, Hill argued, must go beyond conventional defence. “We can’t rely exclusively on anyone any more,” she said. The UK must build “a different mindset” focused on resilience, with practical steps such as first aid training in schools and expanded cadet programmes. “What you need to do is get people engaged in all kinds of different ways in support of their communities,” she said.

Hill contended that the very nature of warfare is evolving. “The Ukrainians are fighting with drones. Even though they have no navy, they sank a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet,” she noted. Traditional metrics – such as troop numbers or naval power – were no longer the sole indicators of military capability.

She recalled a remark from a family friend on her appointment to the defence review team: “‘Don’t tell us how shite we are, tell us what we can do, how we can fix things.’” Her goal, she said, is exactly that – not only to sound the alarm but to provide a path forward.