Putin’s war on UK streets: The criminal networks sowing mayhem for Russia

When a neck massage pillow exploded into flames inside a postal warehouse on the outskirts of Birmingham in July 2024, the firefighters arriving on the scene treated it as a routine “package fire.”

“The fire was extinguished using a hose reel,” read a brief official incident log. “There were no casualties or injuries.”

But what appeared at first to be an unremarkable incident was in fact the result of a plot hatched by Russian military intelligence to send self-igniting devices around Europe, disguised as innocuous gadgets.

One caught fire shortly before being loaded onto a plane in Germany and another burst into flames in a lorry driving through Poland.

The case is one of a rising number of attacks mounted by people paid to act as “proxies” for the Russian intelligence services, who are posing a wide-ranging and unpredictable threat to Britain.

That threat has led to the Government announcing the creation of new powers to ban state-backed organisations and prosecute those supporting them, in a similar way to the current handling of terrorist groups. The legislation will be fast-tracked in the coming weeks, The i Paper has been told.

Russia sabotage on rise in UK

Sabotage efforts have increased since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Security officials believe the chaotic range of targets seen, from logistics firms to public transport and companies supporting Ukraine, aims to create a sense of instability and foster political discontent.

In Lithuania, a group of men are currently on trial, accused of sending the combustible neck massage pillows to Birmingham and other locations.

In a statement on the case, the European Union (EU) criminal justice coordination agency Eurojust said that a multi-national investigation found that the perpetrators had been “recruited and given instructions through an online messaging service” by members of Russia’s GRU intelligence agency.

“The tasks were divided among several alleged perpetrators and payments for the acts were often made in cryptocurrencies,” the statement added.

The methods mirror those employed on behalf of Russia in several other incidents targeting Britain, including an arson attack that damaged a warehouse full of satellite equipment due to be sent to Ukraine for its war effort in March 2024.

The ringleader of that plot was Dylan Earl, a 21-year-old British drug dealer who had offered his services to Russian intelligence agents operating under the banner of the banned Wagner Group.

Earl hired acquaintances to carry out the orders he was receiving on the Telegram messaging app, with a judge later describing the group as “young men who were prepared to undergo a form of radicalisation and betray their country for what seemed easy money”.

Days after an east London warehouse that Earl was commissioned to target went up in flames, another warehouse operated by the same Ukrainian shipping company in Spain was hit by an arson attack. When Earl was arrested, he was trying to recruit someone to burn a third warehouse linked to the firm in the Czech Republic.

Fire has become a key weapon of Russian sabotage in Europe, but proxies have also been recruited for more traditional espionage.

Spies at the seaside – and their minions

In May last year, a group of six Bulgarian citizens were jailed for being part of a Russian spy ring that was operating out of a guest house stuffed with spyware in the Norfolk seaside town of Great Yarmouth.

Their leader, Orlin Roussev, was tasked to carry out surveillance on investigative journalists and political dissidents in the UK, as well as on a US military site in Germany and a Russian fugitive living in Montenegro.

The underlings he employed were both professionally and personally entangled, with Roussev’s second-in-command at one point faking a cancer diagnosis so he could secretly maintain relationships with two women working for the spy ring at the same time.

The reconnaissance missions they carried out would once have been the preserve of intelligence officers and agents, but hundreds of spies were expelled from Russian embassies in the UK and across the EU following the 2018 Salisbury poisoning.

Delivering his annual threat assessment in October, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said that as a result, “Russian intelligence services are picking up what they can online – recruiting proxies on social media platforms, instructing them via encrypted apps, and offering payment in cryptocurrencies.”

He said such proxies were “disposable” and often amateurish, resulting in a “steady stream” of plots being disrupted before completion.

Cash rewards without knowing who you work for

Some proxies have been operating online, with the National Cyber Security Centre saying earlier this year that “Russian-aligned hacktivist groups” had conducted cyber attacks that temporarily disabled the websites of several British local councils, as well as targeting governments and companies in Nato member states.

But while some people hired on Russia’s behalf have an ideological affinity with the country’s political aims, others have acted solely for financial reward and many may not know who they are working for.

Vicki Evans, the Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said last year that some arrangements are “very loose” and many involve relatively small amounts of money, or no payment at all.

She said there was no “fixed profile” for people acting as proxies, adding: “They can be people from a range of backgrounds, a range of nationalities, individuals on the periphery of criminality, and also, unwittingly, some people who think that they’re providing a legitimate service.”

A package of national security laws introduced in 2023 aimed to deal with the complexity by allowing prosecutions on the basis that people “ought reasonably to know” that their actions were assisting a foreign intelligence service, even if their paymasters did not identify themselves.

“There are lots of little hooks in the National Security Act that extend criminal liability to people who do things for other countries,” Jonathan Hall KC, the Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation, told The i Paper. “That is quite useful for proxies.”

Hall said that the law was a reaction to the internet “opening up a method of recruiting people to do things which didn’t exist before”.

“Intelligence officers will be creative, and you can imagine the law will end up having to develop and evolve as more methods are established,” he said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Legislation will be fast-tracked in the coming weeks to introduce new proscription-like powers to clamp down on groups carrying out hostile activity for foreign states, including those who act as their proxies.”