It was almost midnight when a truck driver resting in his cab heard the crackling of flames at a warehouse in east London storing equipment for Ukraine. He grabbed a hearth extinguisher and leapt out — but realized the blaze was too big and retreated.
When police arrived, they banged on the doors of a close-by apartment constructing, shouting at residents to evacuate. Parents grabbed children and bumped into the road.
About half-hour after the fireplace began, Dylan Earl, a British man who admitted to organizing the arson, received a message from a person U.K. authorities say was his Russian handler.
“Excellent,” it read in Russian.
On Tuesday, a British court found three men guilty of arson within the March 2024 plot that prosecutors said was masterminded by Russia’s intelligence services — a part of a campaign of disruption across Europe that Western officials blame on Moscow and its proxies. Two other men, including Earl, previously pleaded guilty to organizing the arson.
The hearth is certainly one of greater than 70 incidents linked to Russia that The Associated Press has documented since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
4 European intelligence officials told AP they’re apprehensive the danger of significant injury and even death is rising as untrained saboteurs set fires near homes and businesses, plant explosives or construct bombs. AP’s tracking shows 12 incidents of arson or serious sabotage last 12 months compared with two in 2023 and none in 2022.
“Whenever you start a campaign, it creates its own dynamic and gets increasingly violent over time,” said certainly one of the officials, who holds a senior position at a European intelligence agency. The official, like two others, spoke on condition of anonymity to debate security matters.
The Kremlin didn’t reply to a request for comment on the British case. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov previously said the Kremlin has never been shown “any proofs” supporting accusations Russia is running a sabotage campaign and said “definitely we definitely reject any allegations.”
Recruiting young amateurs
A lot of the saboteurs accused of working on behalf of Russia are foreign, including Ukrainians. They include young individuals with no criminal records who’re ceaselessly hired for just a few thousand dollars, the intelligence officials said.
The senior official said Russia has been forced to rely increasingly on such amateurs since a whole lot of Moscow’s spies were expelled from Western countries following an operation to poison former Russian intelligence officer Sergey Skripal within the U.K. in 2018. That led to the death of a British woman — and a significant response from the West.
Russia “had to vary the modus operandi, from using cadre officers to using proxies, making a more flexible, deniable system,” the official said.
Documents shared through the London warehouse trial offered a rare glimpse into how young men are recruited.
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Amongst those were transcripts of messages between a person prosecutors said was a Russian intelligence operative and his recruit, Earl, who was lively on Telegram channels related to the Wagner group — a mercenary organization whose operations were taken over by Russia’s Defense Ministry in 2023.
Russian military intelligence — acting through Wagner — was likely behind the plot, said Kevin Riehle, a lecturer in Intelligence and National Security at Brunel University in London.
The recruiter — who used the handle Privet Bot — posted multiple times in a Telegram channel asking for people to affix the battle against the West, Riehle told the court.
Once connected, the recruiter and Earl communicated predominantly in Russian with Earl using Google to translate, in line with screenshots on his phone. Their messages ranged from the deadly serious to the virtually comic.
The recruiter told Earl, 21, that he was “sensible and clever despite being young,” and suggested he watch the tv show “The Americans” — about Soviet KGB intelligence officers undercover within the U.S.
“It can be your manual,” the recruiter wrote.
In a single message, Earl boasted of — unproven — ties to the Irish Republican Army, to “murderers, kidnappers, soldiers, drug dealers, fraudsters, automotive thieves,” promising to be “the most effective spy you may have ever seen.”
Earl and one other man eventually recruited others who went to the warehouse the night of the fireplace. Earl never met the lads, in line with messages shared in court, and it’s unclear whether he ever visited the location himself.
Once on the warehouse, certainly one of the lads poured out a jerrycan of gasoline before igniting a rag and throwing it on the fuel. One other recorded the arson on his phone. It was also captured on CCTV.
The warehouse was the location of a mail order company that sent supplies to Ukraine, including StarLink devices that provide web by satellite and are utilized by the country’s military.
Around half the warehouse’s contents were destroyed in the fireplace, which burned just meters (yards) from Yevhen Harasym, the truck driver, and a brief distance from an outbuilding within the yard of a house and the apartment block.
Greater than 60 firefighters responded.
“I began knocking on everyone’s doors screaming and shouting at the highest of my lungs, ‘There’s a hearth, there’s a hearth, get out!’” Tessa Ribera Fernandez, who lives within the block together with her 2-year-old son, told the court.
A campaign grows more dangerous
When Russia’s disruption campaign began following the Ukraine invasion, vandalism – including defacing monuments or graffiti — was more common, said the senior European intelligence official.
“During the last 12 months, it has developed to arson and assassination,” the official said.
Other incidents linked to Russia with the potential to cause serious injury or death include a plot to place explosive devices on cargo planes – the packages ignited on the bottom – and plots to set fire to shopping centers in Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.
Lithuanian prosecutors said a Ukrainian teenager was a part of a plan to plant a bomb in an IKEA store just outside the capital of Vilnius last 12 months.
It sparked a large fire within the early hours of the morning. Nobody was injured.
More fires and a kidnapping plot
Shortly after the fireplace in London, Earl and his co-conspirators discussed what they’d do next, in line with messages shared with the court.
They talked about burning down London businesses owned by Evgeny Chichvarkin — a Russian tycoon who delivered supplies to Ukraine.
Hedonism Wines and the restaurant Hide ought to be turned to “ashes,” Earl said.
Within the messages, Earl vacillated between saying they didn’t “need” any casualties and that in the event that they “desired to hurt someone,” they might put nails in a homemade explosive device. He noted there have been homes above the wine shop.
That reflects a phenomenon the senior intelligence official noted: Middlemen sometimes suggest ideas — each a “little higher” and more dangerous.
While Russia’s intelligence services try to maintain “strict operational control” — giving targets, deciding on devices and demanding recruits record the sabotage — sometimes “control doesn’t hold,” said Lotta Hakala, a senior analyst on the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service.
That appears to be what happened in London.
After the fireplace, the Russian recruiter told Earl he “rushed into burning these warehouses without my approval.”
Due to that, he said, “it is going to be inconceivable to pay for this arson.”
Still, the recruiter told Earl he wanted to focus on more businesses with links to Ukraine.
“You’re our dagger in Europe and we might be sharpening you rigorously,” the recruiter wrote. “Then we are going to start using you in serious battles.”