A British man appeared in court in London on Thursday charged with preparing to sabotage a drone factory and drone manufacturing sites on behalf of Russian military intelligence.
Prosecutors allege that Joshua Cammidge, 31, contacted a representative of Russia’s military intelligence agency and shared Google map screenshots showing the locations of drone manufacturing sites in Swindon, southwest England.
Britain is a close ally of Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2022 after annexing Crimea eight years earlier.
Relations between Russia and Britain were frosty long before the Ukraine war began — marred by several spy and assassination scandals, including the 2006 poisoning of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London and the 2018 attempted poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.
Cammidge, who is from Swindon, is charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service and carrying out a preparatory act.
According to the charges, he shared Google map screenshots locating one drone factory and four drone manufacturing sites in the town.
He also allegedly “volunteered to commit an act of sabotage”, conducted research about a Wi-Fi jamming device and carried out reconnaissance.
The charges, under the UK’s National Security Act, cover a period between March 27 and September 5 this year, follow an investigation by counter-terrorism police.
Cammidge allegedly communicated with and received instructions from “an individual believed to be linked to the GRU Volunteer Corps, a group controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency”, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said on Wednesday.
He did not enter a plea during Thursday’s court appearance and was remanded in custory pending a new hearing at London’s Old Bailey court on September 25.
Earlier on Thursday, Russia’s FSB security service said it had detained a Russian security guard working at the British embassy in Moscow, alleging he was hired by Ukraine for a false flag attack on the UK ambassador.
The agency said the individual had been recruited by a Ukrainian blogger working with Ukraine’s SBU security service to track events and people at the embassy and take note of the security system.
Ukraine then “planned to use this obtained information to prepare and carry out sabotage and terrorist attacks against the head of the British diplomatic mission and other diplomats, and then accuse the Russian side”, the FSB alleged.
