He did not know the name of his own Prime Minister. He knew Boris Johnson, he said. Keir Starmer meant nothing to him.
This was the detail that hung in the air of Court 2 at the Old Bailey this week, simultaneously the most improbable and the most revealing thing uttered in these proceedings so far. A 22-year-old Ukrainian man, charged with setting fire to property linked to the sitting head of the British government, sat before a jury and told police he had never heard of Keir Starmer.
The jury, you may suspects, will decide what weight to give that claim. The rest of us are left with a question it raises but cannot quite answer: if Roman Lavrynovych did not know who Starmer was, then who did?
WHERE THE TRIAL STANDS
The Old Bailey trial into the alleged arson campaign against property linked to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has now moved from the prosecution’s architecture of the case into the first serious test of the defence narrative. It is the shift from accusation to account, and the jury is being asked to judge the difference.
At the centre of proceedings are three men. Roman Lavrynovych, 22, a Ukrainian national from Sydenham; Petro Pochynok, 35, also Ukrainian, of Holloway Road, Islington; and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, a Romanian national of Ukrainian origin from Chadwell Heath. All three deny the charges. Lavrynovych faces allegations of arson with intent to endanger life. Pochynok and Carpiuc face conspiracy allegations connected to the fires.
The case concerns three fires: a Toyota RAV4 formerly owned by Starmer in Kentish Town on 8 May 2025; a residential property in Islington on 11 May; and Starmer’s former Kentish Town family home on 12 May. The prosecution, led by Duncan Atkinson KC, argues this was not a random sequence of vandalism but a planned set of attacks, allegedly directed by a Russian-speaking Telegram contact known only as ‘El Money.’ Three fires. Five days. One cluster of Starmer-linked targets.
He knew Boris Johnson, he said. Keir Starmer meant nothing to him.
THE POLICE INTERVIEW: A SURREAL RECKONING
The week’s most striking moment came not from live testimony but from a transcript. On Wednesday, jurors were read the record of Lavrynovych’s police interview, conducted on 13 May 2025, the morning after his arrest. Counter-terrorism officers had broken down the door of a property in Sydenham in the early hours and found him in bed. His Fila trainers tested positive for accelerant. A petrol can and a bottle of white spirit, both carrying his DNA, were recovered from the same address.
In interview, a detective asked him directly: ‘I just want to ask you about our prime minister. Do you know who that is?’ Lavrynovych said he did not. The detective tried again: ‘You don’t know who the UK prime minister is? Alright, have you heard of Keir Starmer?’ Again, no. He was then asked about Boris Johnson. He said yes, he had heard of Boris Johnson.
There are two ways to read this. Either Lavrynovych is telling the truth, in which case we are dealing with a man recruited to burn property linked to a political figure he could not name, a hired hand operating in complete political ignorance, which is precisely how modern deniable operations are structured. Or he is lying, and the claim of ignorance is part of a constructed defence designed to sever any suggestion of political motivation. Either reading, if accepted, carries consequences that extend well beyond Court 2.
THE DEFENCE NARRATIVE: COERCION, POVERTY AND FEAR
This week, Lavrynovych’s account began to take shape before the jury. According to earlier reporting from The Times, he told the court he was first contacted on Telegram while looking for work in Ukrainian job groups. The early work, he said, was simple: putting up posters, checking locations, easy money for a young man with debts and a sick father. The tasks escalated. The handler, El Money, used Russian and Ukrainian interchangeably.
By Friday, Lavrynovych had gone further. He admitted setting fire to the Toyota RAV4 once owned by Starmer. He said he had initially refused the offer of 3,000 pounds in cryptocurrency, because he feared being caught. El Money’s response, he told the jury, was not to negotiate. It was to threaten. He claimed the handler told him he knew where Lavrynovych lived and that it might become dangerous for him and his family.
That is now the pivot point of the trial. The prosecution presents Lavrynovych as an active participant: a man who sought money, recruited help, filmed evidence at the scene, complained that the video ‘came out badly,’ and pressed for payment to fund his father’s medical treatment. The defence presents him as a frightened, financially desperate young man drawn in by a shadowy handler and then coerced into completing what he had started. The jury must decide whether what they are looking at is fear, opportunism, or a combination of both from which no clean moral line can be drawn.
The prosecution presents a man who filmed his own crime. The defence presents a man too frightened to refuse. Both things may be true.
THE PRIOR TASKS: GRAFFITI, PROPAGANDA AND THE GREY ZONE
The evidence about Lavrynovych’s work for El Money before the arson campaign complicates the picture further. He told the court he had previously sprayed offensive graffiti on an Islamic community centre in south London at El Money’s direction. He was also asked to put up anti-mosque posters in Southall, though he said he did not complete that particular job because he suspected it was propaganda and feared being caught.
This matters. It establishes that the alleged relationship with El Money did not begin with the Starmer-linked fires. It may have begun as paid nuisance work, low-level political agitation, or simple criminal errand-running. The targeting of a Muslim community centre is not random background colour. It is consistent with a pattern of operations designed to sow social division: anti-mosque propaganda, community provocation, and then, at the top of the escalation ladder, fires at the home of the British Prime Minister.
That is precisely the grey zone in which modern destabilisation operates. Not tanks at the border. Telegram handles, cryptocurrency payments, deniable proxies, and disposable men. The architecture is designed so that the man holding the lighter takes all the legal risk, while the man who lit the fuse from the other end of an encrypted channel walks free.
THE FORENSIC RECORD: WHAT THE PHONES AND THE FIRES REVEAL
The prosecution’s forensic and digital case has not been shaken this week. The jury has already absorbed a considerable volume of material: phone location data placing Lavrynovych at all three fire sites; CCTV footage; recovered images and video; encrypted Telegram messages; and cryptocurrency-linked payment trails. His phone contained an image of turpentine substitute and similar flammable materials, a circled photograph of the Toyota RAV4, a cryptocurrency QR code, and a map showing the car’s location.
At least 320 messages between Lavrynovych and El Money were recovered, beginning months before the fires with lower-level paid tasks and allegedly escalating towards arson. The operational discipline the prosecution has described includes instructions to delete messages, cleaned phones, proof-of-work videos sent to the handler, and a return to the scene to document the damage. In one exchange, Lavrynovych allegedly instructed Carpiuc to delete Instagram and SMS messages before ‘the job.’ In another, he allegedly discussed with Pochynok whether the car was still present and the need to ‘take a video.’
The most striking piece of evidence in the prosecution’s case remains the alleged ‘geranium’ instruction. After the second fire, and before the third, El Money allegedly warned the defendants that they had attacked the home of ‘a very high-ranking individual in Britain,’ told them to leave the city, and instructed them to use the word ‘geranium’ if detained by police. That is not the operational vocabulary of ordinary criminality. It is the vocabulary of a handled intelligence operation.
THE HUMAN EVIDENCE: A FAMILY IN A BURNING HOUSE
The jury heard earlier in the trial from Judith Alexander, the sister-in-law of the Prime Minister. She described being woken in the early hours of 12 May 2025 by a sound she compared to two wheelie bins being thrown at the front door. She saw smoke and an orange glow at the entrance to the Kentish Town house. Her daughter’s bedroom was directly above the fire. Smoke spread through the property. Masks were handed out while the family waited for the fire brigade.
That testimony goes to the legal heart of the case. Lavrynovych has admitted setting fire to the car. He denies the full extent of his involvement in the property fires. But the prosecution’s logic is direct: why do you set fire to the front door of a house unless you intend to endanger the people inside, or at minimum have no regard for whether you do? A fire at a front door does not merely destroy property. It blocks the exit. It can turn a home into a trap. The endangerment element is not an academic distinction.
THE GREAT ABSENCE: EL MONEY IS NOT IN THE DOCK
By Friday evening, then, the trial stood at a crucial stage. The prosecution has laid out a case built on digital evidence, movement data, forensic traces, recovered messages, and alleged payment arrangements. The defence has begun to build a counter-narrative of coercion, poverty, manipulation, and fear. Lavrynovych has admitted one act, denied the broader criminal intent, and attempted to shift the moral centre of gravity onto a figure who is not present to answer.
That is the great absence in Court 2. Three men sit before the jury. Behind them, according to the Crown, is a handler with no confirmed name, no face, no nationality, and no public explanation. The jury has been told, by explicit instruction from prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC, that it is not their task to determine who El Money is or why he may have targeted Starmer-linked properties. That question is formally outside the scope of the proceedings.
The law may be content to try the men it has. Politics cannot be so easily satisfied. The questions El Money’s existence raises are not legal questions. They are national security questions. Who directed these operations? On whose behalf? Why were men of Ukrainian background allegedly recruited to target the British Prime Minister? Was this criminal outsourcing, personal vendetta, foreign interference, or the kind of hybrid operation that intelligence agencies have been warning about for years? Those questions are not before the twelve people in Court 2. They are before all the rest of us.
They should be before a parliamentary committee. They should be before the intelligence agencies, if they are not already. They should be before every journalist in Britain who claims to take democratic accountability seriously, and who has instead spent these two weeks largely ignoring a trial without reporting restrictions at the Central Criminal Court.
The trial is expected to continue for a further week. The defence case has not been fully heard. The prosecution will have the opportunity to challenge Lavrynovych’s account under cross-examination. Nothing in this report should be read as any indication of guilt or innocence. Roman Lavrynovych, Petro Pochynok, and Stanislav Carpiuc are innocent unless and until proven guilty. The jury will decide what the evidence means.
The men in the dock face the full weight of British justice. The man who allegedly pulled the strings faces nothing at all. That is not a legal anomaly. It is the arrangement the court has formally endorsed, and the question it leaves behind will outlast whatever verdict is returned.
