Ukrainian and Romanian men have been jailed after setting fire to properties linked to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, apparently after being promised cryptocurrency payments by an alleged Russian handler.
22-year-old Ukrainian citizen Roman Lavrynovych was called a “useful idiot” by a British judge and handed a seven year prison sentence after he was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit arson and two of “arson being reckless as to whether life would be endangered”. A second man, 27-year-old Romanian citizen and former resident of Ukraine Stanislav Carpiuc was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit arson and handed a two-year sentence.
A third man, Petro Pochynok, was acquitted.
The fires set took place over April 2025 in Islington, London, and in two cases targeted properties formerly lived in by British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and also burnt out a car he had once owned. Given the clear link to the head of government Counter Terror Police led the investigation and arrested the men last year.
The court heard Lavrynovych had been recruited online by an anonymous account, ‘El Money’, and was paid to stick up posters, and then to set fires, and that he was allegedly desperate for money to pay for medical treatment for his father. Lavrynovych’s mother described him as being of little intelligence and naive, reports the BBC, and at the time of his arrest he told police he didn’t know who the British Prime Minister was, and didn’t know the name Keir Starmer.
His defence barrister described him as “utterly naive, utterly gullible, unthinking”. Lavrynovych had been promised money in the form of cryptocurrency for setting the fires but was never paid.
The judge appears to have accepted that Lavrynovych was ignorant of why he was being asked to set fires, and castigated him for doing these “grubby little tasks” in return for cash so uncritically. The Daily Telegraph reports the judge told the court:
You had agreed to carry out that piece of mindless arson for money. You are not a man of great principle and you were easily bought. You were to EL a useful idiot, a fool who could be manipulated to his advantage. You were used by EL to advance some agenda or cause of which you knew nothing. You were essentially acting as a pawn for some unknown cause and putting the lives of those asleep in their beds at risk as a result.
The case follows a familiar pattern seen elsewhere across Europe where petty criminals are offered large payments in return for jobs. Last month, it was asserted the leaving of severed pigs’ heads outside mosques in Paris was a job organised by Russia in this way, for instance. As previously reported:
European governments have for years been preoccupied with what they have come to call Russian hybrid warfare; acts of sabotage and espionage that are meant to disable or destabilise but which fall well short of actual acts of open war. Yet Russia is not the great power it once was, and these operations are no longer carried out by expensive traditional intelligence services and agents, but rather by freelancers paid on a per-job basis, and in at least some cases, unaware of whom they work.
The flip-side to this catch-all bogeyman of Russian intelligence cut-outs is the ease with which Moscow can be blamed for all ills, and allegations of Russian influence or dark money have become a common claim in Western political discourse, whether evidence exists or not.
… A remarkable case in December 2023 saw 14 ‘spies’, who among their number were Ukrainian refugees, sentenced by a court for a plot to gather information and launch a variety of actions and attacks. The court heard how the group were in communication with Russian intelligence and had been promised payments in cryptocurrency payments in return for their work.
The bounties on offer from Moscow were said to have included $5 for putting up a poster disseminating pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian propaganda, or $400 for installing a wireless surveillance camera watching a port, airport, or railyard where military equipment transited from Europe to Ukraine. $10,000 in crypto was apparently offered in return for derailing a military train carrying equipment to Ukraine.
The identity of El Money was not proven in court in the Lavrynovych case, but British state broadcaster the BBC separately claimed it had identified him with the help of Hope Not Hate as Russian diplomat and propagandist Evgeny Lyukshin. It asserted the account had been behind other paid-for incidents in the United Kingdom, and had established fake Islamist and far-right groups to inflame tensions.
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