Vladimir Putin’s Russia is already waging conflict on the streets of London, says a military expert.
The warning came from Leyton and Wanstead MP Calvin Bailey who served for more than 24 years in the Royal Air Force, rising to the rank of Wing Commander.
The Labour MP, who sits on the Commons Defence Committee, highlighted a case in his east London constituency which saw a group of men launch an arson attack on a warehouse.
Dylan Earl, 21, was the ringleader of the plot to set fire to an industrial unit in Leyton which belonged to a company sending humanitarian aid and StarLink satellite equipment to Ukraine.
Earl crafted the plan with right-hand man Jake Reeves, 24, before Jakeem Rose, 23, Nii Mensah, 23, and Ugnius Asmena, 20, were recruited into the scheme. The five were jailed in October for between 17 and 7 years.
Mrs Justice Cheema Grubb branded their actions a “planned campaign of terrorism and sabotage” in the interests of the Russian state.
The plan was driven by the Wagner Group, the private militia which is funded by the Russian state, with operatives in touch directly with Earl.
The Old Bailey was told that there was also a second plot to set fire to the Mayfair wine shop and restaurant belonging to Russian billionaire Evgeny Chichvarkin, a dissident of the Putin regime, and even to kidnap the tycoon himself.
The blaze on March 20 last year caused around £1 million in damage.
“Russia is already waging conflict upon us….we really need people to understand what is happening on the streets of London and across the country right now,” Mr Bailey told the Westminster Insider podcast.
“A foreign power is recruiting agents on our streets and that is impacting young Londoners.”
He was speaking the day after a report into the Salisbury poisonings detailed how a team of Putin’s assassins went through Waterloo station, the second busiest in the capital, carrying the deadly Novichok nerve agent as they headed to the Wiltshire city to try to kill former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in March 2018.
Alexander Petrov, Ruslan Boshirov and Sergey Fedotov, all aliases, were all members of the Russian military intelligence GRU Unit 29155, according to the inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess.
She was killed after her boyfriend picked up a discarded perfume bottle and gave it to her not knowing it contained the military grade nerve agent.
The true names of the assassination squad were Aleksandr Mishkin (Petrov), Anatoliy Chepiga (Boshirov) and Denis Sergeev (Fedotov), the report added.
Sir Keir Starmer said the inquiry into the Novichok poisoning of Ms Sturgess showed the UK must “remain vigilant” to “reckless” Russian hostile activity on UK soil.
The inquiry’s final report said Putin bears “moral responsibility” for Ms Sturgess’s death after concluding he must have authorised the attempted hit on Mr Skripal.
The Russian agents deny wrongdoing and say they were tourists visiting Salisbury.
On the east London arson attack, Mr Bailey, who has a Master in War Studies from King’s College London, stressed: “So in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, we have seen a group of five young men who were funded by Wagner who attacked a railway site that was delivering satellite communications equipment to Ukraine.”
He claimed further: “We have seen a number of other issues, attacks on Islamic education centres and mosques in East London that were funded by the Russian state through Telegram.
“Russia is already waging conflict upon us, that is evident in the Grey Zone Report from the Defence Select Committee, it’s evident in the European report …we really need people to understand what is happening on the streets of London and across the country right now.”
He argued that the Government needs to get public backing to rapidly spend billions more on defence in the face of the growing threat from Russia and other hostile states.
He said: “All of these things are happening and if we are not telling the public such that it’s clear in their mind that a foreign power is actively trying to undermine our cohesion and our democracy then we won’t be able to gain the social licence necessary to give Rachel (Reeves) the power to adjust the Budget which will provide the money to John (Defence Secretary John Healey) and the Ministry of Defence to give the pace that is required (of defence spending).”
In October, three men were arrested in London on suspicion of assisting Russia's foreign intelligence service.
The three, aged 48, 45, and 44, were arrested at addresses in west and central London, according to the Metropolitan Police.
They were detained on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service, namely Russia, under section 3 of the National Security Act 2023.
Commander Dominic Murphy, Head of the Counter Terrorism Policing London, said: "We’re seeing an increasing number of who we would describe as 'proxies' being recruited by foreign intelligence services and these arrests are directly related to our ongoing to efforts to disrupt this type of activity.”
MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum has warned that state threats from Russia, China and Iran are escalating, with the security service having seen a 35% rise in the number of individuals it was investigating in the last year.
There have been a number of mysterious deaths in previous years in London or its commuter belt of Russians who had held prominent positions.
Putin has also been blamed for ordering the fatal poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
The lives of hundreds of Londoners were put at risk by Russian agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, who were found by an inquiry to have killed Mr Litvinenko by poisoning him with Polonium-210 put into his tea at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair.
The radioactive trail they left was the most damning evidence against them, linking them to the scene of the crime, with traces also found at restaurants and hotels, on planes, and even at Arsenal’s Emirates stadium.
Lugovoi and Kovtun have denied wrongdoing.
Having launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin is now seen in European capitals to be testing Nato’s resolve with drone or warplane incursions into Poland and Baltic States.
Britain sent RAF fighters to Poland to carry out patrols to seek to deter further Russian drone activity.
The UK has also warned Moscow that if a Russian spy ship, the Yantar, which has been off British waters north of Scotland, heads closer to Britain it may take military action against it.
The Yantar is believed previously to have been mapping UK underwater cables and a Royal Navy submarine was ordered to surface to force it to leave British waters.
