BBC Investigation Links Russian Diplomat to UK PM Arson Attacks

A 22-year-old Ukrainian builder named Roman Lavrynovych set fire to property connected to Britain's prime minister last year, and when he was arrested hours later, he seemed to understand almost nothing about his target—only that someone had told him to do it and promised money in return. That someone was a handler who communicated through Telegram under the initials EL, and in one message, after Lavrynovych had already torched a Toyota that once belonged to Sir Keir Starmer, EL wrote simply: "Look, you attacked the home of a very high-ranking person in Britain. I'll send you money, you need to leave the city." It was too late. But the real story—the one that never appeared in court—was who EL actually was and who had sent him.

A BBC investigation has now traced the arson attacks back to the Russian state, identifying the handler as Evgeny Lyukshin, a 23-year-old diplomat trained in information warfare by Putin's closest allies. Lavrynovych was convicted on Monday of conspiring to commit arson, along with another man, Stanislav Carpiuc, 27. A third suspect, Petro Pochynok, 35, was acquitted. But the trial itself was peculiar: it focused narrowly on money and motive, deliberately skirting the identity and connections of the anonymous handler. The court knew him only as "EL Money." The deeper architecture of the operation—who directed it, why, and from where—remained officially unexamined.

The arson attacks were only one piece of a much larger campaign. Russian operatives, working remotely through social media and Telegram, created fake far-right and Muslim organizations designed to stoke division, recruit operatives, and generate real-world violence. The most prominent was a group called Direct Action UK, which appeared online in autumn 2024, after the Southport riots. It presented itself as a homegrown British movement but was entirely Russian-run. Messages in the group bore Moscow timestamps, used Cyrillic characters, and placed pound signs after numbers in the Russian style. Direct Action's social media channels branded the prime minister a traitor, promoted hatred of Muslims, offered money for arson and vandalism, and lionized the far-right activist Tommy Robinson. "This is war," the group declared. And although Direct Action existed only online, it generated tangible attacks: six mosques and an Islamic school in London were vandalized after the group offered payment for Islamophobic graffiti. Slogans like "remigration" and "Stop Islam" were spray-painted across the capital, from Croydon to Leyton. The vandalism was then turned into slick social media videos to amplify the hatred and spread fear.

Parallel to Direct Action, Russian operatives ran a second fake organization called the Takbir Foundation, which posed as an Islamic charity dedicated to funding jihad. Its real purpose was the inverse: to inflame the far right by generating Islamic graffiti that would provoke backlash. The foundation offered up to £150 for graffiti work, calling it "halal money to promote the word of Allah." But when it recruited actual graffiti artists in Bristol, it paid non-Muslims to spray Islamic verses on buildings. The BBC tracked down two artists who were approached through a fake Facebook account named "Michael John" offering "a paid opportunity with a generous budget." Both were sent precise images of buildings with highlighted areas showing exactly where to spray Islamic text. Both refused the work, recognizing it as illegal. But the operation revealed the sophistication of the scheme: EL was simultaneously recruiting Lavrynovych for arson, posting anti-Muslim propaganda designed to look Hindu, and running fake Muslim groups to create the appearance of Islamic vandalism. He was manufacturing conflict from both sides.

The disinformation campaign extended to the arson attacks themselves. After Lavrynovych was arrested, Russian-based accounts spread a lie across social media: that the three Ukrainian suspects were sex workers and that the fires were the result of a personal scandal involving the prime minister. It was entirely false. The suspects did not know Starmer personally and were not sex workers. But the lie was amplified by Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist whom Direct Action had promoted. Robinson posted on X that Starmer had been "banging" Ukrainian male sex workers and shared a fake image of the prime minister with the suspects. Putin's special presidential envoy, Kirill Dimitriev, reposted one of Robinson's messages. The operation had come full circle: a Russian handler recruited a Ukrainian to commit arson, then Russian propaganda blamed the arson on a sex scandal, then a British far-right figure spread the lie, then a Kremlin official amplified it.

Evgeny Lyukshin's background illuminates how deeply embedded he is in Russia's power structure. He is the son of a senior Russian diplomat who previously served as counselor at the embassy in Denmark—meaning his father had been in Europe with potential access to sensitive documents, which aligns with EL's boast on Telegram that he had access to NATO and CIA files "because my father leaks part of it to me." Lyukshin studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, a diplomatic academy controlled by the foreign ministry, where he trained in information warfare under a program created two years ago at the Kremlin's direction. His tutors included Andrey Bezrukov, a former KGB officer who spent decades undercover in the West using a stolen Canadian identity before his arrest by the FBI in 2010, and Sergey Nalobin, widely accused of being a spy who once worked at the Russian embassy in London. Lyukshin was also photographed with Mikhail Zvinchuk, the director of Rybar, a state-controlled media organization that has been sanctioned by the UK and US for running disinformation campaigns designed to sow discord and encourage violence. In one Rybar photo, Lyukshin appeared in a group of "future diplomats" trained using Rybar's manuals, though his face had been blurred. The BBC matched his distinctive hoodie to photos from his social media.

When the BBC contacted Lyukshin with evidence that he was EL and a member of the Radio Southport Telegram channel, he did not respond. But hours later, that channel vanished. Four other channels created by Rybar to stoke hatred in the UK disappeared as well, and a photograph of Lyukshin standing behind Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko was taken down from a Russian news site. The BBC presented its evidence to Ben Wallace, the Conservative former defence secretary and security minister. Wallace said the attacks represented a "very deliberate and definite escalation against the British state" and that targeting the prime minister's property would not have come from a low-level operative but "from the very top." Yet the official response has been muted. Counter Terrorism Policing London said police have found no evidence of state backing, despite sources telling the BBC that authorities in both the UK and Ukraine have privately concluded Russia was behind the attacks. The pattern fits a broader wave of Russian sabotage across Europe over the past five years—explosions on railway lines, firebombs on planes, recruitment of proxies through social media. Russia offers payment to young people for escalating crimes, often masked as innocent tasks, then blackmails them if they resist. The operation against Britain's prime minister was simply one more chapter in a campaign that shows no sign of stopping.