The long-running trial of the Russian spy ring did at least bring clarity for journalist Roman Dobrokhotov and his young family.
“The worst situation is when you don’t know,” the 41-year-old Russian said, nursing a tumbler of whisky. “When you don’t know whether you should be very much worried, or you can relax. Now, definitely I know there will be other attempts.”
As revelations tumbled out of the dock at the Old Bailey in recent months, Dobrokhotov, editor of the Insider, a Russian news website, has had to confront a host of uncomfortable truths.
Six Bulgarian nationals with settled status in the UK – Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, Orlin Roussev, 46, Ivan Stoyanov, 32, and Biser Dzhambazov, 43 – were operating between 2020 and 2023 as a Kremlin spy ring based in London and Great Yarmouth that was highly sophisticated and seemingly murderous in its intent.
It was run remotely by Jan Marsalek, a former chief operating officer at Wirecard, wanted over a £1.6bn bank fraud, who acted as an intermediary for the Russian intelligence services.
Dobrokhotov, who in 2019 had revealed the identities of the Russian agents behind the failed nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, was one of the ring’s targets along with his colleague on that investigation, the Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev.
The court heard how two leading members of the ring, Roussev and Marsalek, had discussed using ricin or the nerve agent VX to poison Dobrokhotov, who fled Russia in 2021 and moved to the UK in January 2023.
In one message, Marsalek dismissed an idea, proposed by Roussev, that Dobrokhotov could have an “accident” in the shower, saying: “I fear that’s not dramatic enough … we need something of symbolic value.
“Maybe burn him alive on the street, spray him with some super-strong acid, VX, like the North Koreans, or the ricin,” Marsalek said. “Shower accident won’t discourage others. It must create a dramatic story.”
Dobrokhotov was followed closely, to the point that his iPhone pin number was noted down by one of the female members of the gang who sat next to him during a flight. They discussed abducting him and absconding with their prey by putting him on a boat. “Dobrokhotov will be a counter migrant,” joked Marsalek. “The problem is, how to collect him on international waters. I’m not sure the guys here will trust our abilities enough to place a submarine at our command.”
“Having said that, a successful operation on British ground would be amazing after the fuck-up Skripal stuff,” Marsalek said.
It appears that Roussev was only put off the kidnap plan after an intervention from above. The “guys raised the valid concern that we shouldn’t run any such operation with that team that has never done this before in the country of residence of some of the team members”, Marsalek said.
The details were a shock, said Dobrokhotov. But not, perhaps, a surprise. The son of a professor of philosophy and an engineer who had made a name for himself as an investigative journalist exposing the creep of authoritarianism under Putin, Dobrokhotov made the decision to flee Moscow in 2021 when his flat was raided and passport confiscated by the authorities over a trumped-up defamation case.
After making a run for it via a smugglers’ route through the forest of the Russo-Ukrainian border near Luhansk in the Donbas, the journalist’s first port of call had been Kyiv.
He then moved to Vienna before coming to Britain where his sister had settled. Dobrokhotov’s wife Kate, 40, and their two boys, aged eight and 10, along with his parents later joined him. Throughout his travels he had suspected he was still in the Kremlin’s cross-hairs.
“Right after I left [Russia], I had a phone call from a Ukrainian source who is an FSB [federal security services] officer,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Immediately hide. Ukrainian mercenary guys are riding around Kyiv with your photo, and they are promised $50,000 if they return you to Russia.’ I thought, OK, but I am in Vienna, I’m safe now. What I didn’t know [until the trial] was that, when I was living on the same street as Christo in Vienna, the Bulgarians had rented an apartment opposite to watch us. Or that they had access to Amadeus, which is the ticket booking system and so knew [in] advance about our every flight.”
There were moments in recent years outside Russia when he was sure he was being followed. While in The Hague in autumn 2022 assisting on a film about the late opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, he had spotted a man taking his photograph.
Dobrokhotov took his own picture of the man shadowing him and sent it to the Dutch police. They did nothing. His own research subsequently suggested the suspect was a Ukrainian national living in Germany.
But in the UK? His phone had been acting strangely at one point but he had not spotted anyone lurking. He had been reassured by the close interest shown by the British police in his safety. Then, in February last year, he was contacted by a senior officer.
“They said that they had arrested Bulgarians who were residents in Britain and do you know any of them?” Dobrokhotov said. “So they showed me pictures, and I didn’t know any of them, though actually one of them was trying to befriend me on Facebook … I learned only about all the details after the trial started.”
A treasure trove of espionage gadgets was discovered by the police in a former hotel in Great Yarmouth but there was something decidedly unsophisticated about a love triangle engaged in by three of the ring members.
Dobrokhotov was also reassured during the trial to some degree by the bravado and “stupidity” shown by those after him. But he has since also learned that he remains in danger.
A few months ago, the police called again. Further attempts at surveillance had been made by what appears to be a second ring operating in Britain. “I received a warning from the police last spring,” said Dobrokhotov. “These attempts are ongoing.” The details of the warning are being withheld by the Guardian.
His wife worries. He worries. But there is only so much you can do to keep safe, Dobrokhotov said. His friend and colleague, Grozev, now lives in the US, possibly because of “Moscow rules”, the perhaps mythical convention that the US and Russia do not strike on each other’s territory. Britain no longer feels safe. Dobrokhotov’s current home must remain a secret.
“If you want to have an ordinary life, it’s very difficult to protect yourself,” he said.
“We have to live with the facts that it’s either us or them. It’s either journalists are winning and Vladimir Putin loses his power and there is a regime change – or he will be going after us all the time. It never will stop. No arrest will help.”
