When counter-terrorism police raided a “modest” former guest house in Great Yarmouth, in 2023, they found a trove of spy gadgets, said Mark Hollingsworth in The Independent: bugs, signal jammers, cameras hidden in glasses and ties and stuffed toys. From this “unlikely” setting in Norfolk, Orlin Roussev, a Bulgarian national, had been running a Russian-backed spy ring: he and his accomplices had hatched plans to “burgle, honey-trap, murder and kidnap” across Europe.
Their paymaster was Jan Marsalek, a fugitive Austrian businessman wanted for his role in the €1.9 billion Wirecard fraud, who now lives in Moscow and who told them that he was working for Russian intelligence; their targets included Russian dissidents and the journalist Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian who had exposed Kremlin links to the Salisbury poisonings. Last week, three members of the ring were convicted in London of spying for Russia. Roussev and two others had already pleaded guilty.
Russian espionage has always been a dirty business, said Owen Matthews in The Spectator. But in the past it was at least effective and ingenious. Today, it seems to be “pathetic” and “amateurish”. Roussev assembled a “motley group” of Bulgarians – a medical courier, a beautician, a decorator – whom he nicknamed his “minions” after the sidekicks of the villain Gru in the children’s film “Despicable Me”. They used silly code names: Mad Max, Jackie Chan. Three of them were involved in a tawdry love triangle. When Roussev was arrested, thousands of incriminating messages were found on his phone, which he hadn’t even thought to erase. The reason for the decline is that, since Salisbury and the Ukraine War, scores of Russian diplomats and spies have been expelled from the UK – so Moscow has resorted to “recruiting criminals”.
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They may have been stupid, but Roussev’s gang were still dangerous, said Daniel Boffey in The Observer. They tracked Grozev across Europe. Their handler, Marsalek, proposed killing the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov: “Maybe burn him alive in the street, spray him with some super-strong acid,” he suggested. For Putin’s enemies, nowhere in Europe is safe.
