Today, two men in their 20s were sentenced at the Old Bailey over arson attacks on properties and a car linked to Keir Starmer. According to reports, one of the arsonists, Roman Lavrynovych, 22, was being instructed by an anonymous handler. They communicated through Telegram, a social media channel favoured by the Russian security service FSB to spy on its citizens.
Suspecting the involvement of a state actor, the defendants’ lawyers applied to the judge to obtain information about this handler from the UK authorities. The judge refused, maintaining that such information was “wholly irrelevant” to the case. However, the BBC’s Panorama did some digging and discovered that, in fact, it was highly relevant. In the programme, the handler of the arsonists is identified as a young Russian “diplomat”, Evgeny Lyukshin, 23, whose father, according to their investigation, was an officer of the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
Lyukshin’s diplomatic training in Moscow included information warfare and ways to undermine democratic security. On this course, according to Panorama, he was taught by two interesting characters from the world of espionage and subversion. One is Andrey Bezrukov, an “illegal” SVR officer who spent decades in the US living under a fake Canadian identity, whose family are said to have inspired the hit US TV series The Americans.
This is a story with tragic consequences that Conservative and Labour governments continued to keep hidden from public view
The second tutor of the arsonists’ handler was Russian “diplomat” Sergey Nalobin. Some of you will recognise his name from the chart-topping podcast series Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, which was written and presented by Carole Cadwalladr and Peter Jukes. I am the Sergei of the title. The Sergey identified by the BBC is the person whom I identified as part of Russia’s initial attempts to channel money into the Conservative party in the early 2010s.
For me, learning about Nalobin’s connection to the arson attacks was yet another confirmation that the authorities’ refusal to listen has had grave consequences for our deterrence.
In the years leading up to the Brexit referendum, the government of David Cameron saw the Kremlin as their partner, and my warnings to the authorities about Nalobin fell on deaf ears. In fact, in 2011 I received a written assurance from MI6 that they “had no reason to suspect that [Nalobin] is anything other than genuine” – that is, a diplomat, not an intelligence officer.
They left him untouched and, lo and behold, a year later he helped to form the Conservative Friends of Russia, a political lobbying and recruitment operation that I told the Tory party was being run by Russian intelligence. Even after that, the British authorities did not ask him to leave. Our national security people clearly were not the sharpest tools in the box, particularly when compared to their eastern European peers.
Whistleblower and former BBC journalist Sergei Cristo
A few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Nalobin was expelled from Estonia for actively undermining the security of their country.
This is a story with tragic consequences that Conservative and Labour governments continued to keep hidden from public view. In 2020, the government had the chance to act when the Intelligence and Security Committee published the Russia Report. It found that the intelligence and security services had turned a blind eye to Russian political corruption and subversion in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
The committee demanded that Russian political interference should be properly investigated. Boris Johnson refused. As has every government since.
Why? I believe a lot of it is to do with protecting institutional reputations. Our national security agencies had been too slow to catch up with the evolving Russian threats to our national security. While they focused on intelligence officers working out of the London embassy, the Kremlin increasingly co-opted and deployed Russian oligarchs and wealthy Kremlin proxies, with great success. They also missed the increasingly subversive role of the Russian diplomatic service, which had become more about information warfare and supporting extremist politics in Britain than about building a true partnership.
Our governments put forward several implausible arguments against a public inquiry. For example, that the impressive Russian political finance and disinformation campaign around Brexit had not had any impact on the result of the referendum (the one won by four percentage points? Really?), or that a public inquiry would be too expensive (even though many inquiries have covered far less consequential topics), or that it would breach national security by revealing secret intelligence.
The last argument is also nonsense. Recently, I was privileged to speak to several retired top national security people and took a discreet straw poll of whether they thought a public inquiry into Russian interference in British politics around Brexit was a good idea. I asked two former chiefs of MI6, a former director general of MI5, a former head of GCHQ, a former senior officer on the Joint Intelligence Committee and a former Foreign Office minister. Four were for the inquiry, and two against.
The obvious thing would be to table an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill, which is currently going through the House of Commons, to require the government to conduct such an inquiry. Curiously, not even Liberal Democrats, who have taken a strong line on the subject, have done that.
Britain’s deterrence will only work when all credible threats to our democratic security are disrupted, exposed and investigated, and the culprits are prosecuted and sanctioned. That is the only way to put out the fires.
Sergei Cristo is a former BBC journalist, asset management specialist and Conservative Party fundraiser turned whistle-blower against the Russian interference in British politics. Listen to Byline Times’s award-winning podcast Sergei and the Spy Ring here