Nii Mensah, Jakeem Rose, and Ugnius Asmena. Photo: Metropolitan Police

Three British men have been found guilty of committing an arson attack on behalf of the Russian Wagner Group on a warehouse in London being used to supply humanitarian aid and satellite to Ukraine, BBC News reported on Tuesday.

Jakeem Rose, 23, Ugnius Asmena, 20, and Nii Mensah, 23, were all found guilty on Tuesday at the Old Bailey court in London of aggravated arson with intent to endanger life.

The attack, which caused around £1 million (€860,000) in damages in March 2024, was orchestrated by two other men, Dylan Earl, 20, and Jake Reeves, 23, who had already admitted to committing aggravated arson on behalf of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries.

The men are the first to be convicted under the UK’s National Security Act 2023 for such foreign-directed hostile activity.

According to The Guardian, the court heard that Earl had told a Wagner Group operative he met on Telegram he wanted to carry out further “missions” for the mercenaries following the warehouse fire.

Further plots, the BBC reported, involved additional arson attacks on a west London restaurant and wine shop owned by Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a multi-millionaire and Russian dissident who was named a “foreign agent” by Russia’s Justice Ministry in June 2022, and a plot to abduct him.

“This case is a clear example of an organisation linked to the Russian state using ‘proxies’, in this case British men, to carry out very serious criminal activity in this country on their behalf,” Commander Dominic Murphy, head of London’s Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, said on Tuesday.

“Seemingly motivated by the promise of money, they were prepared to commit criminal acts on behalf of Russia,” he said. “I hope these convictions send a strong warning of the very serious consequences of committing offences on behalf of a foreign country.”

In late May, The Financial Times reported that British security officials were looking into whether Russia was behind three arson attacks on properties linked to UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer perpetrated by two Ukrainian men and a Romanian national.

In early June, Schemes, the investigative unit of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian-language service, discovered that one of the men, Roman Lavrynovych, had posted in a job recruitment chat on Telegram that he was seeking employment. Such group chats are reportedly commonly used by Russian intelligence agencies to hire proxies, RFE/RL reported.

In the last year, Moscow has been accused of carrying out numerous acts of sabotage and arson attacks on public buildings, transport networks and other infrastructure in several European countries, including Poland and Lithuania, as part of what experts believe is a hybrid warfare strategy designed to destabilise the West.