In recent years, the United Kingdom has become a priority target for Russian hybrid attacks and acts of sabotage. The arson attacks on properties belonging to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in May 2025 served as striking proof of this and were carried out by the Russian Federation under a ‘false flag’ and using ‘disposable agents’, for which the Russians enlisted a 22-year-old Ukrainian construction worker, as well as other accomplices who agreed to take part purely for financial reasons, without even knowing who the target of the attack was. Subsequent investigations and a BBC journalistic inquiry established that Yevgeny Lyukshin, a Russian diplomat based in London, was involved in his recruitment; it later emerged that he had been overseeing other operations aimed at stirring up inter-ethnic tensions in Britain.
The facts that have come to light indicate that these acts of sabotage form part of a more complex hybrid influence operation being carried out in the United Kingdom by the Russian security services. The Kremlin regards the United Kingdom as a geopolitical enemy and a prime target for destabilisation, given London’s principled stance on imposing sanctions on Russia and providing military and political support to Ukraine.
UK and are aware of the issues that concern the British public most, one of which is the issue of migration. They carried out their subversive activities using social media and the Telegram messaging app, setting up fake online groups purportedly on behalf of far-right and Muslim organisations, which were used to organise acts of vandalism across the country, as well as to incite hostility between Muslims and British far-right extremists.
One such fake public page, which posed as a British nationalist movement, was Direct Action UK, through which calls for attacks on mosques and police cars were circulated, and instructions on how to make explosives were published.
As a result of its activities, six London mosques and one Islamic school were attacked. Another Telegram channel, the Takbir Foundation – in contrast to Direct Action UK – spread radical Islamist slogans in order to provoke a backlash from the British public.
Radio Southport served a similar purpose and was used to stoke radical sentiment in Britain by whipping up hysteria surrounding inter-ethnic tensions. What all three of these platforms had in common was that they were administered and run by Yevgeny Lyukshin, whom we have already mentioned, who went by the pseudonym ‘EL’ on the internet at the time.
He was identified by journalists and the security services as a staff member of the Russian diplomatic mission in the UK, who was most likely carrying out tasks as an undercover intelligence officer. According to a BBC investigation, Y. Lyukshin’s father is a senior official at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and previously held the post of counsellor at the Russian embassy in Denmark. Thanks to his father’s status and his connections in diplomatic circles within the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Russian national himself was educated at Moscow State University of International Relations, where he studied a programme on information warfare and counter-information under the guidance of instructors linked to the Russian security services.
It is telling that, after BBC journalists tracked down Yevgeny Lyukshin himself and questioned him about his role in coordinating these protests, the Telegram channels Direct Action UK, Takbir Foundation and several other groups of a similar nature were immediately removed from the platform.
However, the Russian security services were unable to completely conceal the evidence of their involvement in this rather clumsy operation, as they left digital traces pointing to their direct involvement, notably: the Moscow time zone in the messages, Cyrillic characters appearing here and there, and the Russian formatting of the British pound sign (£).
The ‘divide and rule’ tactic remains the primary method employed by Kremlin political strategists and the Russian security services to sow discord and destabilise society, exploiting and exacerbating existing social divisions. The Kremlin is always on the lookout for internal fissures – be they migration issues or religious tensions – and deliberately exploits them to intensify inter-ethnic hostility and weaken the country from within.
This destructive approach lies at the very heart of Russia’s geopolitical strategy: if Russia cannot defeat its adversary on the battlefield or in the economic sphere, it does everything in its power to weaken it from within. Russia will not cease its attempts to harm the UK, and the UK must identify these threats in good time and neutralise them so that they do not achieve their objectives.