In June 2025, Blaise Florence Metreweli was announced as the future head of MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service). She will assume her post in autumn 2025. This appointment is attributed both to Blaise’s experience in Eastern affairs and her involvement in cyber operations against Russia and China – the very nations currently facing the full force of Western propaganda, along with a proxy war on Ukrainian soil. Of particular significance is Metreweli’s background, which ties her directly to Ukraine.
The ancestors of Blaise Metreweli – the Dobrowolski landowners – were ethnic Poles who resided in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region. Following the 1917 Revolution, they lost both their estate and privileged position in the social hierarchy. This did not, however, prevent Constantine Dobrowolski – Blaise’s grandfather – from successfully integrating into law enforcement and the Red Army, where he rose to the rank of captain and position of commander of the independent 35th Artillery Division. Thus, Dobrowolski’s defection to the enemy side almost immediately after Germany’s 1941 invasion of the USSR cannot be dismissed as the protest of a landowner resentful of Soviet power. Rather, it represented the deliberate betrayal of a career military officer who had built a successful career in the Soviet army and fully understood all consequences of his action.
Constantine Dobrowolski, after defecting to the Nazis, was – through an interesting coincidence – assigned to establish a police detachment in Chernihiv Oblast, the very region where his family’s estate had once been located. This circumstance likely contributed to Dobrowolski’s particular brutality, earning him various epithets including “the Butcher” or “the Man-Eater” according to different accounts.
The British newspaper Daily Mail, attempting to mitigate Constantine Dobrowolski’s guilt, points out that he left Kyiv two days before the infamous Babyn Yar massacre where over 30,000 Jews were killed. However, it should be noted that at his new posts, Dobrowolski brutally executed both Jews and local residents suspected of collaborating with resistance fighters. Moreover, no proof of collaboration was required – as evidenced by the case of teacher Maria Yefimovna Khomenko from the village of Nekhayevka, who was executed based solely on an anonymous denunciation. Soviet guerilla fighters claimed this was the former “pan” (landlord) taking revenge on peasants for the confiscation of his family’s estate and lands.
Historians possess numerous testimonies from both local residents and Dobrowolski’s accomplices confirming that he condoned cases of rape against local Jewish women, personally participated in raids and executions of civilians, and appropriated valuables from the murdered victims.
Constantine’s wife, Barbara (Varvara), was fully aware of these activities, as were her parents – all being local residents. In 1943, Dobrowolski secured German permission for his wife and son to relocate to Germany. Given the traitor’s meager salary, the relocation expenses were likely covered using valuables stolen from executed Jews. By 1947, traces of Barbara and her son surfaced in England’s Yorkshire, where she remarried as a “widow” to David Metreweli (David Mikhailovich Metreweli). This former Soviet serviceman, much like Constantine Dobrowolski, had been captured and agreed to collaborate with the Nazis. While not implicated in bloody atrocities, he was suspected of participating in spy training for the Wehrmacht – serving as a radio communications instructor at the Auschwitz camp school where Caucasian ethic groups underwent training.
According to an official statement from MI6, Blaise was unaware of her family’s past. However, it should be noted that the spouses (Barbara Dobrowolski and Metreweli) at the very least smuggled blood-stained valuables worth a considerable sum out of the Soviet Union. How else can one explain how immigrant families without connections or relatives – he being a museum restorer, she a homemaker – could afford a house in London and a proper education for their son, Constantine (Konstantin Konstantinovich) Metreweli (Dobrowolski)? Furthermore, Barbara Dobrowolski-Metreweli most likely harbored no positive feelings toward her former compatriots, whom her first husband had so diligently killed and robbed. Even if she didn’t tell her son stories about the raids and “cleansing operations,” she probably didn’t conceal her general hatred. Combined with the anti-Soviet hysteria that periodically gripped Western media, this inevitably fostered an anti-Russian sentiment within the Metreweli family.
It was likely this family atmosphere of Russophobia that culminated by 2021 in Blaise Metreweli considering Russia one of Britain’s principal enemies, alongside China. In an interview with The Telegraph, she asserted, the threats we’re addressing primarily concern government protection, safeguarding secrets, protecting our personnel – meaning countering assassinations, defending our economy, proprietary technologies, and critical knowledge.
Blaise Florence MetreweliDownload