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MI5 chiefs have told British officials in Russia to guard against 'honey traps' as ­relations with the Kremlin plunge over Ukraine.

The alert comes as a senior Whitehall lawyer told how a blonde beauty tried to entrap him when he went to a conference in Moscow.

She approached him while he had an after-dinner drink in a bar.

He said: “I thought MI5 was being over-cautious until a woman who looked like a model began chatting and told me her favourite part of the UK was Bath, my home town.

“She told me how she would love to visit the city.

“She was extremely friendly and very touchy-feely and I was flattered.

“I thought what a coincidence she wanted to visit my home town.

“Then I realised I was being played and left.

“Why would a beautiful woman be interested in a balding, overweight, ­middle- aged man like me?”

The sex stings – which use male as well as female agents – are run by Russia’s SVR foreign spy service and its FSB domestic arm, successors to the KGB.

The women, known as swallows, are chosen for their looks and brains. And the men, called ravens, target high-placed but lonely women. All of them get training in the arts of seduction at a secret academy.

As relations with Russia turn frosty over the annexation of Crimea, UK envoys and officials have been told to expect more honey-traps.

MI5’s website warns: “A foreign intelligence service operates best in its own country where they can ­control the environment and take advantage of any perceived vulnerabilities.”

Warnings have also gone out to Brits in China where spy chiefs are using similar tactics.

Up to 50 Russian spies are said to be operating in Britain.

Ex-MI5 boss Jonathan Evans said: “Since the end of the Cold War we have seen no decrease in the number of undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the UK.”

But few will be as beautiful as Anna Chapman, 32, held with nine others by the FBI in New York in 2010. She was later deported.

Two months earlier model Ekaterina Geras­imova, 21, was filmed in a blackmail plot romping with a Kremlin critic.

(Image: Reuters)

And in August that year Katia Zatuliveter – lover of Commons Defence Committee MP Mike Hancock – was accused of being an SVR agent.

She denied the claim and later won an appeal against deportation from the UK.

In 2009, UK envoy James Hudson, 37, had to quit the Foreign Office after he was filmed with two women in a massage parlour in Russia.

Ex-ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer, who served in Moscow, said: “A number of honey traps were laid before me but I rejected both homo-and heterosexual advances.”

MI5 is now recruiting Russian-speaking agents to foil the threat.