Russia detains former British Embassy guard on treason charges, a day after UK charges man over alleged Russian sabotage plot
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has detained a former security guard at the British Embassy in Moscow and has charged him with treason, an offence that can carry a sentence of up to life imprisonment. The agency has not disclosed the man’s name.
According to the FSB’s account, the former guard was an agent of Ukraine’s SBU service, acting on instructions from Ukrainian blogger Dmytro Karpenko, known online as “Apostle Dmytro”. The agency alleges the man gathered information on embassy staff, including their home addresses, as well as details of their meetings and travel. It also says he studied the embassy’s security arrangements and the events held there.
The FSB claims Ukrainian intelligence intended to use this information to plan an attack on the British ambassador and other diplomats, with Kyiv planning to pin the blame on Moscow in order to draw the United Kingdom into direct armed conflict with Russia and secure additional ammunition supplies. The agency released a video of the detained man in which he repeats the account the FSB has given. The clip blurs his face.
The FSB has not released the suspect’s name or said when he was detained. The independent outlet Mediazona noted that a Moscow court ordered a man named Marat Droganov to be held in pretrial detention in late July, and that his birth year matches the one given in the FSB’s statement. Before his arrest in the treason case, Droganov had been subjected to series of so-called “carousel arrests” — in which a person is repeatedly re-arrested after being released from jail — on minor charges.
Citing data from leaked recruitment-site records, Mediazona said Droganov had worked as a security guard since at least the 2010s, though it could not confirm whether his work was linked to the British embassy. Journalists did find photos on his social media showing him in guard’s uniform alongside British royal guard officers, with the Kremlin visible in the background.
The case emerged a day after London police announced the arrest of Joshua Cammidge, 31, a UK resident accused of breaching the National Security Act by cooperating with Russian intelligence. Investigators allege Cammidge had been in contact with a GRU-linked volunteer unit that recruits people to carry out sabotage and other operations.
