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Abu Dhabi regards that they helped Egypt a lot over the past 15 years,” said HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, the London think-tank. “So they expect backup on positions that they have on issues that they consider to be primarily Emirati in focus.”

Saudi Arabia is trying to project an image of maturity, stability and statecraft: the actor behaving with composure while others escalate,” said HA Hellyer, an expert in geopolitics and Middle East studies at the Royal United Services Institute and the Center for American Progress. “Mecca and Medina are simply too sacred, and too central to the global Muslim consciousness, to be drawn into geopolitical retaliation. Riyadh would be extraordinarily reluctant to restrict Iranian access to the hajj absent a clear and specific security threat.”

It's not the first we have heard from a high-profile public figure in the UK warning of the Russian threat...with this speech the GCHQ head trying to raise public awareness of current hybrid threats from Russia to the UK."