Alleged Bulgarian spies working for Russia targeted Ukrainian soldiers training in Germany, British prosecutors told jurors at the Old Bailey.
UK police arrested the three Bulgarian nationals, who were living in the UK, in February 2023 following an investigation involving MI5 and the Metropolitan Police. Prosecutors have charged the Bulgarian man and two women, who maintain their innocence, with conspiracy to spy in the ongoing Old Bailey case that began on December 2.
In October and November 2023, the group allegedly targeted Ukrainian soldiers being trained to use air defence systems at Patch Barracks, a US facility near Stuttgart, said the Crown Prosecution Service’s Alison Morgan KC.
Two other Bulgarian men, Orlin Roussev and Biser Dzhambazov, have both entered guilty pleas for the same charge of conspiracy to spy.
Prosecutors alleged Roussev, who previously worked in financial services, was the group’s ringleader and was in contact with Russian intelligence.
Lawyers told the court that within Russian intelligence services Roussev’s contact was an Austrian named Jan Marsalek, who formerly worked for a German payments processing firm.
“This case gives a fascinating insight into the changing tactics of Russian intelligence,” Sergei Cristo, a former journalist who now helps run an intelligence podcast, told Brussels Signal on December 5.
Russian intelligence “now increasingly uses people in commerce and crime as operatives, rather than their own intelligence officers, who can be easily exposed, as Bellingcat investigations successfully showed”, he said.
Bellingcat is investigative journalism group that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT). It was founded by British journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 2014.
Besides targeting the Ukrainian soldiers training in Germany, the spy ring allegedly discussed kidnapping UK-based journalists who were investigating Russia’s links to the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, prosecutors told the London court.
In particular they were accused of targeting Christo Grozev, a Bulgaria-born journalist, who at the time was lead Russia researcher for Bellingcat.
As well as discussing the kidnapping and killing of Grozev, Roussev and Marsalek talked of using one of the two Bulgarian women in a so-called “honey trap” to seduce him and produce compromising videos, prosecutors alleged.
Besides Grozev, the ring also allegedly targeted Roman Dobrokhotov, a UK-based Russian journalist who founded The Insider, a Latvia-based online publication specialising in investigative journalism and exposing fake news, and Bergey Ryskaliyev, a dissident from Kazakhstan.
The case at the Old Bailey came as “MI5 and SO15 are now scrambling to catch up with Russian spying activities after years of neglect. With some success, it must be said”, said Cristo.
Prosecutors described Roussev’s guesthouse in the Norfolk seaside town of Great Yarmouth as “packed” with technical equipment used for intelligence collection.
When Roussev was arrested in February 2023, devices discovered in the guesthouse included 221 mobile phones, 258 hard drives, 495 SIM cards, 33 audio recording devices, 55 visual recording devices, 11 drones, 16 radios, and three IMSI grabbers, which can capture and exploit data from devices such as mobile phones used nearby.
Prosecutors alleged the gang used the IMSI devices to track the Ukrainian soldiers’ mobile phones.
The guesthouse also contained forged press passes for the US channels Discovery and National Geographic, suggesting three of the ring had also posed as journalists.
