At the height of the Cold War, the Russian embassy in London was the base for Moscow’s shadow war against the UK.
From inside the thick-walled Kensington mansion, Kremlin spies orchestrated the betrayal of the “Cambridge Five” and the assassination of a dissident with a poison-tipped umbrella.
In more recent years, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium, and the Salisbury poisonings, have been tied back to Russian intelligence operating from within the London site.
The latest as extra police deployed to Middlesbrough
Hundreds of extra police officers have been drafted in after a series of deadly incidents in Middlesbrough.
Series of violent incidents
A spate of violent incidents has occurred in Middlesbrough in recent days:
- On Saturday, a head-on car crash killed two police officers and five young men.
- On Wednesday, a house fire claimed the lives of a seven-year-old girl and her aunt.
- Other reported incidents have included a stabbing and properties being rammed by cars.
- Videos shared on social media appeared to show several cars on fire at a vigil on Thursday night for one of the men killed in the crash.
Multiple blazes
The house fire in Grangetown, east of Middlesbrough, on Wednesday killed Natalie McDonald, 34, and seven-year-old Valentina Foster and injured four others.
On Thursday evening, videos shared on social media seemingly showed several cars on fire in Haswell, County Durham, at a vigil where balloons were released in tribute to one of the men killed in the A66 crash.
Investigations ongoing
- Local police have not ruled out a link between the crash and the fatal house fire.
- Several arrests following the crash are reportedly part of investigations into alleged organised crime.
- Meanwhile, two men have been arrested on suspicion of murder in connection with the house fire.
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Car torching ‘unacceptable’
Meanwhile, Durham Constabulary said the behaviour of the crowd who set fire to a number of cars was “completely unacceptable”.
Police were called out to a private field shortly after 5.30pm on Thursday, where five vehicles were wrecked as a large crowd gathered to release balloons, flares, and fireworks.
Nobody was injured and the officers deemed it safest to let the vehicles burn-out. No arrests were made in connection with that incident.
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200 extra officers on the ground
Amid the incidents, which local MP Andy McDonald described as “terrorism”, councillors revealed 200 extra police officers from forces including the National Crime Agency were helping under-pressure Cleveland Police staff with investigations.
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People are saying they are going to their shops and not feeling safe to do so and feeling trapped in their own homes. That is just unacceptable. This is terrorism and we’ve got to have an appropriate response to deal with the people who are causing such mayhem in our communities and to allow people to lead their peaceful lives.
andy mcdonald, labour mp for middlesbrough and thornaby east
Thunderstorms and heavy rain could hit large parts of the country over the bank holiday weekend, forecasters have warned.
New weather warning
A new yellow warning has been issued by the Met Office for heavy showers and thunderstorms which could cause travel disruption and flooding across much of England and Wales.
The warning, in place from midday until 9pm on Friday, means flooding of some homes and businesses is likely, trains may be delayed and car journeys may take longer.
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Where could be affected?
- The thunderstorm warning covers most of Wales plus southwestern and northwestern England and both the East and West Midlands.
- Yorkshire and Humber could also be affected, as could much of eastern and central England, as well as London.
- Thunderstorms will bring 10-20mm of short-lived rain in a few places with the potential for 30-40mm where there are repeated downpours, the Met Office said.
Fresh flood alerts
Meanwhile, fresh flood warnings and alerts have been issued after dozens of homes were damaged by flood water following widespread drought conditions.
As of Friday lunchtime, there was a warning for expected flooding at Walverden Water at Nelson, Lancashire, while 10 areas were covered by Environment Agency flood alerts, meaning floods are possible.
An unsettled weekend
- The unsettled weather is set to continue through Monday.
- Some sunny spells are expected to be mixed with more heavy rain and possible thunderstorms.
- Fresh westerly winds will also make it feel blustery.
- Scotland is likely to be wettest on Monday while England and Wales can expect some sun and showers.
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Currys and Wickes join plug-in solar roll-out
The price of plug-in solar panels is expected to drop to under £600 in the weeks ahead, with more retailers beginning to sell the renewables kits.
First steps
British company UKSOL, selling its , has become the first supplier to meet regulatory compliance for the devices.
The 460W panels are on sale through Argos and builders’ merchant City Plumbing, with more retailers expected to follow after new rules allowing sales of plug-in solar products in the UK came into force on Thursday.
Wickes and Currys join solar rush
Wickes said it would be making plug-in solar available to its customers “in the coming weeks” while Currys said it was working to make these products “available to UK households as soon as possible, including through both our website and larger stores”.
Lidl, Asda, B&Q, Screwfix and Amazon have all expressed interest in the self-install kits but are yet to offer an update on their release.
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Price drops to come
- UKSOL said pre-orders were in the “low thousands” for its £699 single-panel kit and £999 two-panel kits.
- The company plans to launch four more models in October.
- This will include a slightly cheaper single-panel kit, priced from £599.
- The Government expects single-panel kits to “settle” between £400 and £600 as retailers roll them out.
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Rockstar releases GTA VI preview
- The “extended look” debuted on Netflix on Thursday evening.
- Six hours later, it was released by Rockstar Games on YouTube.
- It comes more than 18 months after the last official teaser trailer.
Dual protagonists
New footage featured sprawling cityscapes, gun battles and high-speed pursuits while offering a glimpse of the game’s new graphics and world-building.
What else to expect
- The preview showed the couple fighting their way out of a drug pick-up after a police raid.
- Vice City, which featured in previous editions of the series, also reappears in GTA VI.
- Meanwhile, players’ actions can reportedly control how the characters’ story unfolds.
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No word yet on GTA Online
The footage illustrated GTA VI’s new and improved graphics, worthy of a game with a budget reportedly among the most expensive in video game history.
Rockstar, however, has yet to release details about GTA Online, having previously confirmed the game would launch initially as a “single-player experience”.
The Man I Am
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Improved graphics in GTA VI
Not long to wait now…
Pre-orders for the long-awaited game, which will be the popular franchise’s first instalment since 2013, began on 25 June.
GTA VI is set to be available on Xbox and PlayStation consoles with a planned release date of 19 November, having been delayed on a number of occasions.
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Four things to know as death toll from Nepal flash flood rises
Hundreds of people have died following flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet, while search and rescue operations for the many who remain missing are proving difficult.
What caused the flooding?
A collapsed glacier near the border between Nepal and China’s autonomous region of Tibet on Wednesday resulted in a huge flood wave that surged through the region, bursting rivers banks, covering populated areas in thick mud, destroying houses and roads and blocking a key border crossing.
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Hundreds of casualties
- Nepal Police confirmed on Friday that at least 547 people have died.
- Hundreds have been rescued but some 1,500 more people remain unaccounted for across Nepal and Tibet, authorities said.
- Among the missing are 33 British nationals, including children.
- Nepal’s government has released a list of over 537 foreign nationals who have been out of contact since the floods hit.
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Second flood risks
- Rescue operations have been hindered by fears of a second flood.
- A new barrier lake at the flood site began to overflow on Friday, temporarily halting efforts.
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UK offers support
- The UK has offered £5m to help the Nepalese government.
- Andy Burnham also offered for emergency responders to head to the affected region.
- The Prime Minister described the situation as “very distressing and devastating”.
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Devastating floods
Cuts to meet demand
A report by the NHS Alliance, which represents health trusts and hospitals, examined increased spending on ADHD and autism services across 42 regional NHS integrated care boards (ICBs) in England.
It found the uptick in funding required to meet soaring demand for ADHD diagnoses was forcing some NHS boards to cut crucial care in other areas to balance budgets.
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Some of the numbers
- One region saw a tenfold spending increase from 2024-25 to 2025-26, from £1.75m to £18m.
- In another region, spend on adult ADHD services went from £11m in 2023-24 to £38m in 2024-25.
- For the 2026-27 financial year, this is projected to rise to £51m.
What’s behind increased spending?
Under the Right to Choose initiative, the 800,000 people on NHS waiting lists for an ADHD assessment in England, have a legal right to NHS-funded private assessments.
The NHS paid for 100,000 private ADHD assessments via the initiative last year, contributing to the steep rise in spending.
- There are also “huge variations in the prices paid for services”.
- The NHS Alliance report found assessment fees ranging from £300 to £3,000.
- This possibility for profit has in turn caused a dramatic increase in private ADHD providers.
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This week it emerged that Russia’s ambassador to the UK, Andrey Kelin, had been called back to Moscow, and had yet to be replaced amid mounting diplomatic tensions.
It means the public role of the embassy – as a diplomatic bridge between the Kremlin and No 10 – is not functioning in the normal way.
But the secret role of the site – as a forward base for Vladimir Putin’s intelligence agents operating in the UK – is very much still active.
The i Paper has spoken to multiple experts and insiders to build a picture of the role of Putin’s London mission in the hidden “grey war” on the UK’s streets.
Leigh Turner, a former UK ambassador to Ukraine and author of the book Lessons in Diplomacy, said the embassy “is a spy hub anyway”, and the withdrawal of Kelin will not change that.
“The ambassador himself won’t be deciding what the spies do inside the Russian embassy,” he said. “The resident, or head of station, will be doing that.”
The head of station is a term to describe the senior intelligence officer operating in a foreign country, usually based in an embassy or trade mission.
MI6 and the CIA also run similar teams within the UK and US embassies around the world. It is why a common response in tit-for-tat security rows is to expel several of a rival country’s diplomats.
Many so-called “diplomats” will in fact be helping to gather intelligence, and may even be intelligence officers themselves.
Expelling spies
The UK government has repeatedly identified and expelled undeclared Russian intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover out of the Russian embassy in London.
In the most recent case, in 2024, Russia’s defence attaché was identified as an undeclared military intelligence officer and expelled. Following the Salisbury nerve agent attack in 2018, Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats for being suspected spies.
British security services assess that this move was a significant factor behind Russia’s current use of criminal groups to act as its “proxies” in Britain, both for acts of espionage and sabotage. These groups are typically directly organised from outside the UK, court cases show, but providing “on the ground” intelligence, diplomatic and logistical support is the role of security services operating in foreign countries.
However, Russian intelligence officers remain in Britain – albeit thought to be in smaller numbers – and UK intelligence agencies believe the London embassy is linked to wider espionage work such as illicit communications interception and data collection.
Former CIA officer Sean Wiswesser said the London embassy operated like a “giant ear”.
“It is a major signals and listening post for the collection of electronic intelligence, signals intelligence, and generally as much data and cyber collection they can possibly do from the embassy,” the author of said.
Like Russia’s other consular headquarters around the world, it would be a base for officials in Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service and GRU military intelligence, he said.
Having no ambassador would not “decrease the ability of the Russian overseas intelligence service to do its business day-to-day”, said Turner, who led the UK’s mission in Ukraine from 2008 to 2012 and has also served in Moscow.
A new Russian ambassador would probably only be involved with the spies when they are “going to do something really risky that might come out” – in preparation to “deny anything and say it’s nothing to do with Russia”, he said.
History of assassination plots
A spokesperson for the Russian embassy said Kelin, who served in his post for seven years, made “considerable efforts to preserve contacts and channels of communication” with the UK during his time as ambassador and accused the UK government of choosing a “path of confrontation” with Moscow.
Keir Giles, associate fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme, said that despite this reduction in communication, “the UK is an important intelligence target for Russia”, noting the “expulsions of large numbers of Russian military intelligence across Europe”.
“We can assume that a substantial number of embassy staff are still working for the Russian intelligence services,” Giles said.
The UK has a long history of assassination plots linked to Russia’s secret services – from a poison-tipped umbrella killing Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 on Waterloo Bridge, whose perpetrator remains untried in court, to the 2006 murder of former FSB agent Litvinenko via polonium-laced green tea, and the Salisbury poisonings that inadvertently killed a British woman.
Markov was targeted by the Bulgarian secret service, with the technical and logistical assistance of the KGB. A former Soviet ambassador to the UK, Viktor Popov, claimed during the 1980s out of 70 diplomatic staff at the embassy, only 15 were “genuine” diplomats, with the rest being intelligence officers.
The Russian intelligence officers behind the Salisbury poisonings and Litvinenko’s murder had been flown into the UK directly from Russia and removed shortly afterwards, but official inquiries have uncovered links to the Russian embassy in London.
Before his death, Litvinenko alleged that an embassy official had commissioned a “reconnaissance exercise for a possible attempt to assassinate” Russian exile Boris Berezovsky, who died in unclear circumstances at his Berkshire home in 2013.
Litvinenko also reported “repeated visits” from a different embassy official to his home in the years leading up to his death, and said he believed that the man was the Russian agent in charge of monitoring him.
The GRU operatives dispatched to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal with novichok in 2018 were housed in hotels and removed rapidly from Britain, but UK intelligence services noted “unusual and increased activity” at the Russian embassy in the days around the attack.
Wiswesser said there “would certainly have been support” from intelligence officials operating within the London embassy for the “collection of background and intelligence” that fed into both the Skripal and Litvinenko killings.
Beyond Russia’s covert operations in the UK, Turner said it was difficult to read too much into Kelin’s quiet removal from his London post.
“We’re all looking for straws in the wind in this latter-day Kremlinology that we face of trying to work out what the Russians really mean by anything they do or say,” Turner said. Russia has “a state policy of never saying what they really think – or indeed telling the truth”, he added.
Bigger concerns in UK-Russia relations
There are concerns that Moscow may choose not to replace Kelin – a move that could further dismantle the very limited communication between the two countries over Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Turner suspected that Kelin’s departure was not a formal withdrawal and is not intended as “a grand gesture” to the UK.
“If the Russians were to expel the British ambassador, that would be a very serious sign of displeasure, that they really weren’t interested in working with us,” Turner said. Only if Kelin is not replaced after some three months, he said, should this be seen as Russia “seeking to downgrade their relationship” with the UK.
A gap between ambassadors is not unprecedented. Kelin was only put in post three months after his predecessor Alexander Yakovenko departed in 2019.
Following confirmation of the departure, the Russian embassy said it had no intention “to downgrade the level of diplomatic relations between our two countries”.
For now, matters in London are in the hands of the chargé d’affaires, Vasily Tsyganov – the only publicly listed senior embassy staff member. A chargé d’affaires is a lower-ranking representative than an ambassador and is accredited to the foreign ministry rather than the head of state.
Natia Seskuria, senior research fellow for Russian and Eurasian security at the Royal United Services Institute, said the vacant post was not a “significant concern” for the UK government at this stage.
“UK-Russia relations are already at their lowest point in decades, but the current gap does not necessarily mean that the Kremlin will not appoint a new ambassador to London,” she said.
“Of the possible escalation options available to Moscow, diplomatic escalation would be among the least harmful and predictable.”