As news of the Heathrow fire shutdown was breaking, I was in my sickbed – some weird gastric infection if you must know, which meant bed and bathroom were the limits of my movements, including the ones you really don’t want to know about.
I avoided the news, thinking perhaps that what for Donald Trump was a comms strategy – “flood the zone with shit” as Steve Bannon put it – had become for me a deeply unpleasant new symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome. In between dozing and feeling sorry for myself, I tried to read.
As the Heathrow news pinged in via various news alerts, I had been reading Foreign Affairs magazine, and a fascinating article by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, who specialise in analysing the work of the Russian security services. “Arsonist, Killer, Saboteur, Spy” ran the main headline, above a picture of Vladimir Putin. And the subhead: “While Trump courts him, Putin is escalating Russia’s hybrid war against the west.”
The piece began with an account of a meeting that took place in the European Parliament a week after Trump had taken office to begin his second term. James Appathurai, a Nato official specialising in hybrid and cyberwarfare, warned European Parliament members that Russia was intensifying its use of hybrid, and that it posed a major threat to the west. He revealed that since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, sabotage operations linked to Russian intelligence had been recorded in 15 countries. These included, he said, “train derailments, arson, attacks on infrastructure, and assassination plots against leading industrialists”.
The A-word leapt out. Arson. Mmm. Like the fire in the spring of 2024 at a Ukrainian-linked parcel delivery warehouse in east London, blamed on the Wagner group, and for which two British men were arrested. “Most of the sabotage operations the Kremlin has launched over the past two years lack direct traces to Russia,” Soldatov and Borogan explained. “Many also involve local perpetrators who have been recruited via social media for one-off jobs for a few hundred dollars.”
And this paragraph really stood out amid the thousands of words detailing some of the operations, with Germany, the UK and Poland the Kremlin’s main European targets. “These attacks are not merely designed to keep European governments off-kilter. They are also aimed at diminishing Europeans’ support for Ukraine by raising costs on the governments and industries in ways that are not easy to counter, harassing the population, and seeking vulnerabilities in European defense.”
The official word on Heathrow thus far is no foul play, and I am happy to believe that. The Russians, however, revel in the mayhem their hybrid actions cause, involvement or no involvement. Hence the tweet of top troll Dmitry Medvedev, who was pretend president during the four years Putin pretended not to be: “I’m looking forward to Russia being blamed for the Heathrow fire? What are you waiting for, Starmer?” He was clearly enjoying himself.
If you were to imagine a dream scenario for the Moscow planners of the operations Mr Appathurai was talking about, a simple fire shutting down our biggest airport, causing chaos for millions and economic pain – would be right up there.
The main point of the piece, though, was that while president Trump thinks a good relationship with Putin is evidence of his deal-making genius, the Russians are using the rapprochement not to wind down their intelligence operations against the west, but to step them up.
They can hardly believe their luck that Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as US director of intelligence, a seat from which she spouts Kremlin talking points about Ukraine with zeal; or that Trump golf buddy Steve Witkoff is now in charge of an image-building programme aimed at projecting Putin as a cuddly, God-fearing peace-lover who must be trusted because he prayed for Trump; or that they are shifting much of the CIA’s focus from Russia/Ukraine to China’s economic interests and Mexico’s drug trade; or that they are scrapping the programme that helps track thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and the sanctions to punish those responsible for the violation.
Time to get back under the duvet.
I love it when wheels work within wheels to positive effect. Here are four seemingly random wheels.
I was born in Keighley, West Yorkshire. I strongly support Ukraine in the war that followed Russia’s invasion. I have always preferred rugby league to rugby union. A week last Friday I was a guest on The Last Leg on Channel 4.
As a result of these four wheels whirring somehow in unison, Ukraine’s rugby league team will now be properly kitted out. Ukraine’s what, you ask? Yes indeed, the sport is played there, with a league of five clubs and a national side, though so many players are either fighting or have died in the war that games have been reduced from the usual 13-a-side to nine. Thanks for nothing, Vlad.
The Last Leg’s Aussie presenter, Adam Hills, is more than just a huge rugby league fan. He is president of the Rugby Football League, no less, and was a player in Warrington Wolves’ Physical Disability side (Hills was born with just one foot and wears a prosthetic lower right leg).
In the episode I was on, Hills did an item on his conversation with Ukraine’s head coach, Artur Martirosyan, currently manning an anti-aircraft gun on the frontline, who explained some of the struggles the war was creating, up to and including sourcing kit for the international side he was determined to keep going.
I had plugged the team of my birthplace in the discussion that followed, and was barely out of the studio when a message pinged in, from Keighley Cougars’ owner, Ryan O’Neill, saying he would get the kit made and supplied for free.
And if that isn’t enough to wind up the MAGA-Reform crowd, who think Ukraine doesn’t deserve a national anything, let alone a rugby league side with nice kit, wait till they hear about the Cougars’ co-owner… Kaue Garcia: gay, Brazilian, with dyed blonde hair, and Ryan’s partner, too. In this toughest of sports, in a tough northern town, a gay couple sat down to watch The Last Leg and ended up kitting out the Ukrainians. Stay woke, folks! It gets stuff done.
Having promised more cultural recommendations, here is another one: Kyoto, at Soho Place Theatre. This fairly small, tightly packed theatre was perfect for a play that attempts to get you into the very heart of the negotiations that led to the Kyoto Agreement on climate change. We were all given delegates’ passes as we arrived – I was Poland – and some members of the audience got to sit at the negotiating table with the actors.
Given the state of the climate debate right now, with “drill, baby drill” back in the White House, and Kemi Badenoch trying to ape Nigel Farage in talking up the risks of net zero rather than the benefits, the triumph that Kyoto represented feels a distant memory. But the play also restores your hope that politicians and campaigners really can work miracles, if they keep at it. Great to see John Prescott’s role recognised too, though it is sad that he never got to see it.
