The Rest Is Classified - 41. Putin’s Minions: How Russia Spies (Ep 1)

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

What do a fading seaside hotel, a self-proclaimed Q, and an eyelash champion have in common? They're all part of a bizarre Russian spy ring operating in the UK. But beneath the absurdity lies a serious threat. What were these "Minions" really up to? And how close did they come to compromising Western security? This is the story of a group of Bulgarians, directed from Moscow, who engaged in a series of increasingly audacious espionage operations across Europe. From tracking journalists to plotting kidnappings and deploying high-tech spy gear, their activities reveal the Kremlin's relentless pursuit of its enemies. Join Gordon and David as they delve into the darkly comic yet deeply concerning world of modern Russian espionage. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. Pre-order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogni.com/restisclassified Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. ["The Game Changer Theme"] Minions, minions have been on this planet far longer than we have. They go by many names, Dave, Carl, Paul, Mike. They're all different, but they all share the same goal. To serve the most despicable master they could find. Making their master happy was the tribe's very reason for existence.

That's not to say, though, that they didn't have other passions. Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And dear listeners, that is a reading from the opening of the wonderfully iconic, culturally significant film, The Minions, delivered to all of us in 2015. And Gordon, why in the world did you include a Minions quote to lead off these episodes? Purely because I wanted you to read it. I've just learned that you've just spent the last

few days doing research for this pod by watching Minions films, which I think is true dedication to the craft of our podcast. That's right. And the listeners should be aware that although the next couple episodes that we are going to do are really about spy craft and not about the minions, I have exclusively binged the Despicable Me franchise, the minions films, I've gone deep into fan wikis on the minions.

So Gordon will handle the spy craft and I will handle the cultural references, as it were. Spoken like a true former CIA officer, right? You're going to blow up it. Well, there is a reason why we've started with the Minions. There is. And I will have my revenge for you making me read that quote, by the way. I look forward to it. Yes, it's coming.

What we're actually doing this week, other than talking about the Minions, is we're telling the pretty wild story of a group of Bulgarians who were found guilty of spying for Russia in Britain. Now it's been in the news in Britain here recently but I think it does make for a particularly interesting case for anyone out there who is interested in understanding how Russia spies these days and the kinds of people it uses and the wild things they get up to. I think it's got the extremes of the spy world in it, it's fair to say. It's got a rich array of characters from a kind of nefarious baddie,

who could be like from a spy film or even a kind of Scooby-Doo film or something like that. Or a villain from the Despicable Me franchise. Exactly. Come on, you missed an opportunity right out of the gate. Stay within the franchise, that's what he's telling me. Exactly, exactly, come on. So we've got a villainous character who was once one of the most f Stay within the franchise. That's what he's telling me. Exactly, exactly. Come on.

So we've got a villainous character who was once one of the most fated businessmen in Europe and we go from that to beauticians who specialize in eyelashes. We've got exotic locations from Vienna to Valencia, Berlin to Montenegro, but also a pretty cheap, I'm afraid quite grubby hotel in a British beach resort. And we've got spy gear. Lots of spy gear. Lots of spy gear to come, which is going to be kind of fun. And there is a comic element to this, I have to say, as the Minions quote suggests. It does feel a bit closer, in my sense, to slow horses than to Bond in its feel.

It's decidedly not Bond, as we will see. It's decidedly not Bond. It's got that slightly grubby, slightly ridiculous feel. And most importantly of all, it's got Minions we'll come to the minions and the reason why we were reading out the minions quote in time. But it is also a serious story, I guess we should say, because we shouldn't dismiss it as all being comedy because it is a story about a group of people who were carrying out surveillance, which could have been used for kidnap or assassination and for targeting people in Ukraine and for serious consequential espionage, even though, as I said, there's a kind of faintly ridiculous

air to it. Yeah, there is kind of a darkly comedic aspect to the whole thing, but it is, as you said, Gordon, I think a really fascinating case study into exactly how the Russians are spying in Europe today and in particular in the UK, of course. And you're exactly right that if this group, as we'll see here, had not been apprehended, I think they could have done real damage. So we're again in one of these spy stories where, you know, we're going to in our kind of Russia's classified way lead into the absurd, but underlying all of it is a very serious effort by the Russians to rebuild, I think, spy networks

in Europe that have been really put under a lot of pressure since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And it really does show, frankly, I think how clever the Russian services can be and how resourceful they can be if they are trying to create a capability to reach out and touch people in Western Europe that they don't like. So very serious kind of, I think, goals. Despicable, you could almost say. Very despicable goals on the part of the Russians carried out in sort of an absurd spy theater, which we're going to just really feast on over the next couple episodes. But Gordon, take us to the, I guess, the morning of the 8th of February, 2023.

And it is 6 a.m. It's still dark. And there are a large herd of police officers getting ready to bring the heat to a group of Bulgarians. That's right. It's dark. It's a cold February morning. The police are waiting at lots of different properties, some in London, but particularly one we're going to look at first, which is in, of all places, Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. Now this is quite an odd place, it's fair to say, to be the hub of an international spiring. It's centred on a fading Victorian building on this beach resort, the kind of place people used to go when they would holiday, I think, on the English coast. They do that

perhaps less than they used to. I don't know what the American equivalent is to this. Somewhere in Jersey, David. Maybe Jersey. When you say used to, like, do you mean in the Victorian era or do you mean? Yeah. Okay. That was its heyday or maybe the 20s and the 30s. The 20s and the 30s, yeah. I mean, look, it's a lovely place, but it's maybe this hotel, let's put it that way, is perhaps past its prime. It's close to the beach, three stories, 33 rooms, eight bedrooms. It had been a three-star hotel. And I'm going to read you from TripAdvisor. Providing an ideal mix of value, comfort, and convenience, it offers a family-friendly

setting with an array of amenities designed for travelers like you. It's very personal. Yeah. Another review, which I struggle to believe is real. Lovely stay, the soundproofing is very good. Hotel seems to attract a diverse international crowd, but they seem to keep themselves to themselves. Some evenings, the TV reception seemed to have a lot of interference, but this did last

one. When was it posted? Was it posted after the arrest? That's what I think. I think someone is having some fun. It has to be, right? Soundproofing, that is important though, I think. I mean, you don't want to hear the sort of screams and rumbles of the rooms next door. Is it fair to say

that this beach, as I'm picturing it, Gordon, is this the sort of beach that has needles on it? Like you have to wear shoes because there's so much sort of paraphernalia that might prick you and infect you? No, no. That is really, I'm going to stand up for the Norfolk Tourist Board here in the hope of some sponsorship in the future and just say that it is a lovely beach around there and it's a lovely place to go. And that is besmirching. Back to spy base, because the police are massing at 6am.

The Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorist command, which deals with national security work, is amassing outside. The police burst in through the door. They run in shouting, police, stay where you are. There's great body cam footage of them going in through the door or making their way through these quite chaotic rooms and they find a man who looks bewildered and he goes, it's the wrong place, he says, stumbling, clearly in shock. Now, this man is Orlin Rusev and he is the leader on the ground of the spiring. Now like all of the group, he is a Bulgarian. Let's just explain who he is a little bit.

He had worked in engineering companies in Bulgaria, then he'd moved to the UK around 2009. He set up companies working on secure communications and surveillance tech. So he is an engineer who understands the technical side of how to secure your communications and maybe how to spy on other people's. He's obviously got a little thing about espionage. He uses 007 in one of his email addresses. So he actually liked to think of himself as Q from the James Bond films. And so I think that's one example of how he sees himself at least. But in reality, I mean, again, he's Dr. Nefario from the Minions, right?

I mean, from the Disquiet Will Me franchise. Now, Rusev is not elderly, but like Dr. Nefario is the sort of elderly, hearing impaired, gadgeteer who develops all of these wonderful weapons for grew and the Minions so he thinks of himself he's bonder is cute in the bond franchise but. In reality he's a guy like the far yo who builds a fart gun for for grew because he grew said to build dart gun and he miss her right because he's hearing impaired he the dark gun, he built boogie robots instead of cookie robots. Okay, so Q or... Yes, or Nefario. Or Nefario. Okay.

But this hotel is, as he would put it, his Indiana Jones warehouse. Really just mixing. Yeah, he's really messing with his films, isn't he? Because I think what he means is that scene, you know, at the end of Blades of the Lost Art where they've got all the boxes of stuff. But you're right, he's mixing his films up a little bit too much because either he's Q or he's Indiana Jones. It looks like a ransacked Best Buy.

It doesn't really look like the Indiana Jones warehouse. It's very neatly stacked and the crates are massive. This sort of looks like a person on PCP wandered into Best Buy after hours and tore the place up. And you can see that from the body cam footage that there's a ton of stuff littered around and we'll come back to what that stuff is in the spy gadgetry later. But the key thing is this is his spy base. He's running things and this ring out of this great Yarmouth former hotel as the boss. He's getting orders from Russia, will come to the mystery figure who's doing that later as the good plot twist there. But the rest of the group are based in London and this is where we're going to get to the minions. So Rusev

is tasking another Bulgarian who's based in London called Bissar Zambazov. We're going to strain Gordon's Bulgarian pronunciations to the breaking point here. You'll have no help from me by the way. I will say none of their names. Okay. But I apologize to Mr. Zambazov, who's currently serving at His Majesty's pleasure. And to all Bulgarians, I think also. Sorry, that's true. So he is the kind of main assistant who Rusev and Great Yarmuth is tasking. Rusev in their communications like to use the code name Jackie Chan, again, messing up his film references and not keeping it in one

brand. Zambazov uses Van Damme as in Jean-Claude Van Damme. So Zambazov or Van Damme is the one who's going to in turn use his contacts in London, more Bulgarians, to actually carry out the missions. It's kind of a subcontracting model. And these were the group described as the minions. So we're not just making this up. Rusev describes them back to Russia as the minions who were carrying out tasks. And so I think these minions are, if you like, seen as the lowly figures who are going to kind of do the hard work, I guess like the minions in the films, but they've got a bit more personality than the minions from the film.

So who are they? Zambazov or Van Damme? First of all, he uses his partner, Katrine Ivanova, with whom he lives in Harrow North London. They work in healthcare and they run a Bulgarian community group. Now, before you think they are the perfect couple, on the day of the arrest, so on the day that the big raids happened, February 8th, Zambazov isn't with her, is he? He is found naked in the bed of another member of the cell, Vanya Gabarova, when the police come to raid her flat in Euston to arrest her. Now, Ivanova doesn't know about Gabarova, so Zambazov would come up with the story that he had brain cancer and that was how he explained his absences to both women and why he couldn't always be

where they wanted him to be. Brain cancer, that's what he went for? That's what he went for. I mean, that feels extreme to me. I mean, I presume if you had brain cancer, you would be undergoing significant, maybe I guess that's why I'm saying that's why he chose it because he's undergoing significant like radiation chemo for periods of time and can disappear. So maybe he's a genius.

Maybe and he's promised Gaburova he'll soon be leaving his partner even over, but of course he's not going to. And so Gaburova as well as being Zambalsov's kind of mistress girlfriend, she is a beautician in Acton. Acton, home of Asma al-Assad, former Syrian first lady. Yeah, second time we've had Acton in the pod. But again, not the most glamorous of locations, no offence to West London Actonites. Now she runs a salon called Pretty Woman and had recently won an eyelash championship and she specialises in something called

Russian eyebrows, which I do not know about, but I understand you do. Well, in addition to researching the minions, I did a little Googling on Russian lashes and Russian brows. Two different things, Gordon. Now, if this is incorrect, someone should write in and set us straight. But what Gaburova won that eyelash championship for, I guess it's called Russian volume lash extensions, which is kind of a, it creates almost a fluffy and a fan type shape in the eyelashes. I guess they're made of synthetic mink. It's very

interesting and can last for several weeks. So there you go. And then the Russian brow, which I believe she also did work in, is a cosmetic procedure that sort of reshapes, lifts, fixes the brows to give the appearance of a higher and fuller brow. So she was a serious real deal beautician. And it seems Gordon that she had great online reviews as well. Yeah. Everybody needs Gamma over in our life. She is stunning too. Plus she is very reasonable was one of the online reviews. Stunning and reasonable. So- Stunning and reasonable. So come for the spying stay for the eyelash explanations. That's

our podcast. But also, right, we're nearly there with the minions. Also in the cell, to make it even more complicated, is her ex-boyfriend Timur Ivanchev. Now he'd been in a relationship with Gabarova, the beautician, until the previous year. Hope you're following this. And he'd at one point bought her an engagement ring. This is quite sad. Before discovering she was seeing Zambazov, Van Damme, her handler. But he's still in the cell and he, Ivanchev, is a painter decorator based in Enfield but also formerly an international championship open swimmer. Very diverse set of talents and interests on the part of the Minions, yes.

But what I love is the name Minion was attached to his number in Zambarzov's phone. So if he ever called Zambarzov, the phrase Minion would show up. I am looking at pictures of the mugshots right now and I do think that of all of them, he is the one who most closely bears a resemblance to the actual minions in sort of the state of maybe sort of shock and bewilderment on his face compared to the others. And there's also a sixth member of the cell, Ivan Stoyanov, who fought in mixed martial arts using the name The Destroyer.

That's too on the nose for a villain name. That he needs a more proper villain name like Vector or El Macho or Wild Knuckles or something like that from the franchise. Well, he definitely looks it. He's a kind of sturdy character. So there we go. We've got our cast of characters. Rusev in Great Yarmouth is our boss who thinks he's Q or Dr. Nefario or whatever. And then Zambazov, the wannabe Van Damme with the complicated love life running the minions, you know, his partner even over the girlfriend, the beautician. And then finally Stoyanov, the destroyer.

They're all sleeping with each other and with Van Damme. Not quite all of them, but close. So having established who they are, let's take a break and then we'll come back and look at what they were up to. This episode is brought to you by our friends at NordVPN. Now, Gordon, you've come across the sinister and secretive side of trading bots, haven't you? Unfortunately, David, I have. For those who don't know, trading bots are automated software programs designed to trade in financial markets.

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We have done our sort of tour dominions here to set up this crew, Gordon. And I guess the question is, what are they getting up to? What are the minions doing? What are they doing? What are the minions up to? Well, when it comes to their prosecution, the case will be based on six operations across Europe. Now, not all of the team are involved in all of them.

They're all involved in some of them. And that will allow us to kind of look at some of what they were doing. I think they were doing a lot more than those six operations, and we'll look at some of them in more detail than others, but it does give a kind of flavour of what we know about it. A lot of this came out in the court case. Want to thank Trevor Barnes, who's a great spy writer himself, who attended every day

of the hearings and was really helpful in just exploring some of this detail. But most of the operations, we should say, were involved in targeting opponents of the Kremlin in different ways across Europe and not just in Britain. So the first one, which I think is particularly interesting, is targeting Christo Grozev. Now, Christo is maybe known to some people here, but he's a Bulgarian himself, originally by background, but he becomes best known as a lead investigator into Russian spies, particularly with Bellingcat, the open source investigations organization. And Bellingcat, we should say, you know, have done this amazing work really over the last

10 years in using open source information, publicly available information or other databases to track particularly Russian activities. And Christo has been at the leading edge of that. The organization is really fascinating, I think has reshaped, frankly, what's possible to do outside of the service of a spy agency, right? Because they're not working for a government. It's all open source. They have access to a tremendous amount of data, some of which they're sort of buying and synthesizing in really unique ways. And they do have a real deep focus on Russia, the war in Ukraine, also the activities of Russian

military intelligence, the GRU, all over Europe. I mean, they look at things like wildlife trafficking and US border patrol raids, right? So, I mean, it's a very, very interesting group that's kind of reshaping the world of OSINT, you know, open source intelligence. I've known Christo many years. I really got to know him around 2018 with the Skripal case, the Salisbury poisoning, because he and his work had done a lot to track down some of the Russian GRU, Russian

military intelligence officers who'd been behind that, look at their travel patterns and expose them. And so you can see because of that, Why the Kremlin's not a fan of Kristo-Khrosev. Why the Kremlin is not a fan of Kristo-Khrosev. And apparently a message sent to Rousseff, who you remember is the great Yarmuth head of our spy ring, you know, apparently Putin seriously hates him. So the suggestion there is that Putin personally has a thing about Christo and so you can see absolutely why they would be very interested in him. And there's a very good film which has just come out. The film is called Antidote, there's

a TV version called Kill List, which actually looks and follows Christo around this period where he's being put under surveillance. And it's a pretty remarkable insight to what it's like to be under surveillance. And during this period, his father dies, who is in Vienna, and he's worried that it could be suspicious. So there's a real impact on Christo's life. But for a lot of this period, he wouldn't have known he was under surveillance by this group. Christo, by background, Bulgarian, as I said, interesting background because he'd then become a businessman in the radio world and then in his words had a midlife crisis and decided he wanted to go into investigative journalism and gets really involved in this work. So he's traveling all over Europe and

this group, the minions, are tracking him and trying to work out where he's going. They're following him from Vienna where he was living to Montenegro. They tail him on a flight to Spain, Ivanova, the girlfriend of Zambazov or the partner, covertly films him. He's photographed in a hotel in Valencia eating breakfast. It appears that they talked about trying to use Gaburova, the beautician in a honey trap, to try and target him. They're compiling reports and they're being sent out back to Russia, So they're providing a really detailed set of information about what Christo is doing, where he is. And you can see the risk and the danger for him for that. And he comes to believe, right, that the Kremlin had plans to kidnap him. I think he said send

him to a torture camp in Syria. And frankly, this group tailing him, surveilling him, compiling this kind of pattern of life information, presumably at some point, that planning flips from let's watch him to let's figure out a way to actually kidnap him or kill him, right? I mean, they're not just doing this for, they're not doing this to collect information on him. They're doing this to find vulnerabilities, right? That's right. I mean, some of the messages within the group and from Moscow are talking about this possibility. Now, they don't actually put in place a kidnap plan. But Rousseau, the great Yarmouth man says, you know, if Grozov is in Bulgaria, I have the resources to kidnap,

drug him and lock him up in a secure cave. Now, I don't quite know what a secure cave is, but they're talking at the very least about it and they don't go through with it, but the danger is clearly there for him and he will be warned and he's not the only one who is being targeted. So there's also a second operation targeting Roman Dobrikotov, who is a Russian who fled to the UK. He's another investigative journalist, works for something called the Insider, which is a Russian language publication, also publishes some stuff in English, and which again exposes stuff the Kremlin's up to. So again, you can see the motive for the Kremlin wanting to

know about him. And again, there's surveillance following him around Europe. There's a fascinating detail about this and about how they follow him. In one case they actually manage to get on a flight with him and they've got a corrupt airline worker who is able to give them a his flight details and be seat Ivanova next to him or at least close to him so that she can try and peer over and and actually try and get the PIN code from his phone as he's inputting it. So you can see that by having a network of people, they're actually able to really get quite close to these people. I mean, it does seem like the surveillance that the minions are sort of undertaking here,

I guess, feels a little bit maybe inconsistent or incomplete. I mean, they seem to be doing a lot of this while these targets are traveling, which to my mind, maybe wouldn't be the easiest place to get them because, you know, they're going to be out of pattern anyway. Understanding we might have an incomplete picture, I can start to understand why Rusev is referring to them as minions because it feels a little slap shot to me. They're trying to be helpful and useful, but they're also sort of play acting spy, right? And they're amateurs.

Rusev has some kind of formal engineering and surveillance tech training, but the rest of them really don't. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there is talk again with Dobrikotov about a kidnap plot, and there's talk about kidnapping him in the UK and then smuggling him out in a small boat from the Norfolk coast, allowing him to be taken back to Russia on something called Operation Boat, which is a very cleverly codenamed operation. But the view was again, you know, that was too dangerous.

He typed operation and then the cursor just sat there for about 20 seconds and he couldn't come up with anything better. And then he just typed in boat. Boat. Boat. Operation Kidnap Boat. I mean, it's quite interesting because they seem to get a lot of their ideas from previous spy operations.

So there's some references to the Mossad abduction of Eichmann, a Nazi fugitive, and also in some of their messages supposedly to the French intelligence's sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, which is something we did an episode about or a series about a few months ago. And it doesn't go well for the French a few months ago. That's right. And it doesn't go well for the French, by the way. It doesn't. You wouldn't want to be copying that. It feels like that's not where I'd take, I'd maybe go more on the Eichmann side, as opposed

to the French failure to escape New Zealand after blowing up a Greenpeace boat. Yeah. But we should say that our pod is not designed to give undercover teams any ideas of possible plots, because we just want to disassociate ourselves from any Russian spy rings currently listening who think they can get some ideas from this. Our sponsors at the Norfolk Tourism Board have expressly, they wanted us to give that disclaimer.

So thank you. Yeah, exactly. I've done that. I've done that properly. There are some more of the operations. We won't go into too much detail about them. There's another one targeting a former Russian official who's fled to Montenegro. Gaborova, the beautician, goes over there. She's using some kind of smart glasses which can take pictures to try and record some footage of

him. They're renting a villa in Montenegro. They're talking about kidnapping plans. Supposedly there, there is a team from Russian intelligence who are also on the ground featuring, according to one news report, a chain smoking blonde referred to as Red Sparrow, which is one of those. The Jason Matthews novel. Great novel. Then we've got two operations linked to Kazakhstan. Again, we won't go into too much detail. There's surveillance of a former Kazakh politician in London. Now, when Stoyanov, who is the

destroyer, the mixed martial arts guy, he's challenged for sitting in a parked car outside this guy's house. He comes up with a cover story about that he's actually working for a nearby hospital and he places an NHS sign on his vehicle the next day, you know, his cover. And then they also, there's one more interesting one on the Kazakh side where they target the Kazakh embassy in London, or at least they talk about it. This is interesting because they were going to create a fake opposition group, stage a demonstration, including throwing fake pig's blood, also do a deep fake pornographic video of the Kazakh president's son, and then they would feed intelligence about this fake group to the

Kazakh intelligence services. And supposedly this was all done to try and improve Moscow's position or relationship with the Kazakhs. So it's kind of weird. Well, I will say, I mean, so I don't want to plug my books too much on this podcast, but in my second novel, there's a whole scene where Russian intelligence officers are using real pig's blood to sort of create the sense that there's an accident, someone's there's a corpse thrown on a car and there's pig's blood that the corpse has been filled with that splashes everywhere and then it's used to sort of put

the heat on somebody in Moscow X. So, but I don't know why they would use fake pig's blood. You can just get a real pig. That's true. Get down the butchers. I think the slightly squeamish bit of me would rather get some fake stuff. The authenticity is lacking here in these operations, I think. Right. Let's come to one more operation because I think this is actually a really significant one and an important one because it's a US military barracks, a place called Patch Barraks in Stuttgart.

And this operation is, I think, particularly significant because this base is believed to be a place where Ukrainian troops were being trained by the US in surface-to-air weapons systems and particularly air defence systems like the Patriot missile battery. So it's an important location and the group are sent out there to try and spy on this base. Now, they'd adapted a second-hand Chrysler car in order to put into it something called an Imse Grabber or IMSE cratcher. Just to explain to people what that is, it's quite small, it's about the size of a shoe

box, costs a lot, costs about £120,000. You can't buy it on the normal commercial market because it's something that law enforcement and spies use because it creates a fake cell phone tower effectively, a mobile fake cell phone tower. So if someone's phone is in the area, it will connect to that rather than a real cell phone tower. And then you can extract all their data and identify their phone by having it connect to you.

So it's quite a useful, quite a high end piece of kit. And they put it inside the car. And there's a picture of it, which has got a big red button on the front of the car by the air conditioning vent which you press which would kind of start the impasse grabber and allow you to do that. So that I think is quite interesting in terms of what they were going to do because it looks like the idea was the Russians know that there are Ukrainian troops training on air defence at that base. So if you can identify them and their phones, that becomes really useful when they go back

to Ukraine. Because one of the things that anyone who's followed the Ukraine conflict closely will know is that the Russians have been launching all these air strikes, drones, missiles on Ukraine, and Ukraine has limited air defence to try and stop those, and it's vital. And they go to huge efforts to try and protect their air defence. So I remember when I've been in Kiev in Ukraine, one of the things you're not allowed to do, or they're very careful about you doing, is putting on social media or filming any footage showing where air defence interceptors are being launched up at incoming drones and missiles.

And the reason is because they don't want the Russians in real time to be able to go that's where the air defence is because then they will just drop a missile down on that air defence system like a Patriot missile battery and take it out. So those are hugely sensitive things for Ukraine because they've got a limited number. And the point about this operation, which I think is really interesting, is it would have allowed them, wouldn't it, for the Russians to potentially use the phones

of those being trained to use it, to find them and locate them and then take them out. There's different variations of them, right? So some of them that can actually pull data from phones, others that just sort of almost like catch the phone like a tower, then release it, but you end up with the MC, the International Mobile Subscriber Identity Number.

And then you could match that to the MC numbers you're grabbing in Kyiv, let's say. And if they appear in both locations, you can have some certainty that it's a Ukrainian Air Defense Officer. And wherever that phone is pinging in Kyiv would be a location that you would want to target with a missile, right? They're using minions, but it's a pretty sophisticated, pretty nefarious plot, I would say, right? That could have had real battlefield implications on the war in Ukraine. Absolutely. I think that's a really good point because I think it's smart, it's technically proficient

because you've got these devices and they've clearly got them from somewhere. And's got real consequences because if you take out those air defences, there are more Russian missiles, more Russian drones are going to get through, people are going to die. People are going to die in Kiev, in other cities across Ukraine as a result of that kind of activity. So I think it goes back to the sense that just because these weren't highly trained spies, it doesn't mean the consequences couldn't have been serious. So Zambazov and Ivanova, the couple, go out on a reconnaissance mission and they seem to film the perimeter.

Then on the 1st of February 2023, the handler in Russia tells Rusev that apparently 70 Ukrainians have arrived in Germany to train how to use the Patriot air defense system. So at this point, they are planning to head out. So the plan is for them to go out to Stuttgart to use this impasse grabber hidden in the car and to capture some of the signals. And then it's at that point on the 8th of February, 2023, just as that's being planned, that they're busted by Scotland Yard and the British police. And it's got to be the case that at that point, the police had been watching and were probably

in the comms, right? And saw this and said, we can't allow this to happen, I would think. You would think, but actually people have said that they've denied that there was a direct link between that. So why? I agree. It's a bit mysterious and maybe we'll explore that a bit more, which is why they do get arrested and how they get onto them. Because I think there are some mysteries about that, but I agree.

It looks very, very suspicious, the fact that they are arrested just as they're planning to go out to Stuttgart. But that is just one of those missions from the minions. They're being paid for it, we should say, about 210,000 euros, roughly 200,000 pounds or whatever, is going into Rusev's account, the great Yarmouth man's account, and then out to the other five for that work.

Where's it coming from? Well, it's coming from Moscow. So I think maybe, David, should we stop there? And next time we'll resume and we'll look at who's running this operation, the mastermind, the supervillain, this baddie running this crew in Moscow. That's right. So see you next time for Minions, Spy Gadgets and the Secret Mastermind. See you next time.