Starmer Arson Trial: Day Two

Paul Knaggs writes:

“My Grandmother Lives There”: Lavrynovych’s Defence of Fear in Starmer Arson Trial

Officers found him in bed. His trainers tested positive for accelerant. Yet Roman Lavrynovych told police he was only ever a man checking for cameras at night, paid for nothing, threatened by a voice he never saw, terrified for a grandmother he could not protect.

Old Bailey, London | 30 April 2026

IMPORTANT: All three defendants deny every charge against them. The defence case has not yet been presented to the jury. Nothing reported here constitutes any indication of guilt or innocence. Roman Lavrynovych, Petro Pochynok, and Stanislav Carpiuc are innocent until proven guilty. The jury will determine what the evidence means.

There is a particular quality to a dawn arrest. The door comes in. The lights go on. The world tilts. Whatever story you have been constructing in the interval since the events in question, whatever account you have prepared for the moment of reckoning, is now being tested against a reality that does not wait for you to wake up properly.

In the early hours of 13 May 2025, counter-terrorism officers broke down the door of a property in Sydenham, south-east London. Inside, they found Roman Lavrynovych, 22, asleep in bed. They also found a petrol can, a bottle of white spirit, and a pair of Fila trainers. Forensic examination of all three items returned the same result: the defendant’s DNA. The white spirit, the jury at the Old Bailey has now been told, was detectable on the trainers.

The second day of this remarkable trial, sitting before Mr Justice Garnham, was given over to the mechanics of detection. How the police found what they found. What the defendants said when they were asked to explain it. And, most significantly, what one of those defendants eventually admitted when the explanations began to run out.

FIRST THE DENIALS, THEN THE ADMISSION 

In his initial police interview, Lavrynovych denied everything. He was at home on the night of 8 May, when a Toyota RAV4 formerly owned by the Prime Minister was set alight on Countess Road, Kentish Town. He was at home again on the night of 11 May, when a front door in Ellington Street, Islington, was set ablaze. On the night of 12 May, when a second property, this one still owned by the Prime Minister and occupied by his sister-in-law, was also set alight, he claimed to have been visiting his friend Petro in Camden.

Officers placed his phone at the locations. They showed him the data. He maintained his story. Then, at the close of the interview, an officer asked a direct question. Had someone asked him to set fire to the three addresses? Lavrynovych paused. He said: “I think you need to speak to a different person.” Asked who that person might be, he replied: “I don’t know, I never saw this person.” The officer pressed again. Was he saying that someone had asked him to set fire to the three addresses? “Yes,” he said. “He threatened me by saying that I would have to do the job as he knew where I lived. I was scared as my grandmother lives at the same address.”

A PREPARED STATEMENT AND A DIFFERENT STORY 

When Lavrynovych returned to the interview room, he had a prepared statement. The tone had changed entirely. The account he now offered was not of a man who had set fires, but of a man who had been manipulated, used, and left unpaid by a figure he knew only as “El.” 

The contact, he said, had offered him £1,500 to check two addresses for CCTV cameras. Just that. Nothing more. He was to go at night, send a message confirming no cameras were present, and wait for money that never arrived. 

“He sent me the instructions on the same day that I had to go and instructed me that I go at night,” Lavrynovych stated. “He said that once done, he would pay me and I trusted him. I needed the money. He has not paid me though.” 

As for the white spirit on the Fila trainers: he thought he might have spilled it while decorating. He told officers that “El” had threatened him. Knowing where he lived, the contact had made clear the job would be done whether Lavrynovych wanted to do it or not. “I felt threatened,” he said in his statement. “He threatened me by saying that I would have to do the job as he knew where I lived. I was scared as my grandmother lives at the same address and I could not be sure that he would not do anything.” 

He insisted, plainly and clearly, that he “did not commit arson at any address” and that he did not know who had.

THE AIRPORT, THE SILENCE, AND WHAT THE PROSECUTION SAYS IT PROVES 

While Lavrynovych was being processed and charged on 15 May, events elsewhere were unfolding with their own significance. Two days later, on 17 May, Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, the Ukrainian-born Romanian national from Chadwell Heath in east London, was found in the departure lounge at Luton Airport. He was about to board a flight to Romania. He was stopped. In subsequent police interviews, he made no comment.

On 19 May, Petro Pochynok, 35, the other Ukrainian national charged in this case, was detained in Chelsea, west London. He too made no comment in his police interviews.

Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC told the jury that the evidence, taken as a whole, points in one direction. All three defendants, he said, agreed to set fires in a residential area, knowing property might be destroyed and understanding that the lives of the people inside those buildings might be put at risk.

Carpiuc’s attempted departure from the country hours after the charges were filed will no doubt be placed before the jury as a significant fact. The prosecution is not yet required to say precisely how it characterises that moment, but the timing speaks for itself.

THE SHADOW OF ‘EL MONEY’ 

What the jury has been given, across two days of prosecution evidence, is a case that is in some ways straightforward and in other ways deeply peculiar. The straightforward part is the forensic trail: the phone data, the CCTV, the Telegram messages, the DNA on the accelerant-stained trainers, the image of a figure standing before a burning car.

The peculiar part is the figure at the centre of all of it who remains entirely invisible. The person communicating in Russian, in contrast to the Ukrainian used between the defendants. The person who promised cryptocurrency and issued the codeword “geranium.” The person who told the defendants they had attacked the home of “a very high-ranking individual in Britain” and instructed them to leave the city. The person who remains, as far as this trial is concerned, without a name, a nationality, or a face. 

The jury has been directed that identifying “El Money” is not their task. The prosecution does not need to prove who gave the orders, only that the three men in the dock agreed to carry them out. But the unidentified figure at the top of this alleged conspiracy is the question that no one in this courtroom, and precious few in the media covering it, is yet willing to ask aloud. 

This case is not prosecuted under counter-terrorism legislation. The Metropolitan Police have not attributed the attacks to any foreign state. Those remain the official positions. They deserve to be stated plainly, as they have been throughout Labour Heartlands’ coverage of these proceedings. 

But a Russian-speaking Telegram contact, directing a covert operation against properties linked to a sitting British Prime Minister, promising cryptocurrency, issuing safe-word protocols, and instructing the executors to destroy their communications and flee the city, is a set of facts that carries its own weight regardless of how the charges are framed. 

A Russian-speaking contact, safe-word protocols, cryptocurrency, and a standing instruction to destroy every message. The charges may not mention terrorism. The facts do not care what the charges mention. 

WHERE THE TRIAL STANDS 

The prosecution has now completed two full days of evidence. The jury has heard phone location data, CCTV footage, encrypted Telegram messages, a filmed attack, a return to the scene to photograph the damage, DNA evidence, an airport interception, and a defendant’s own admission that someone directed him to act. 

Against that, the defence has not yet spoken. Lavrynovych’s account, that he was a man hired to check for cameras and threatened when he hesitated, that he was never paid and never set a fire, will now need to be tested under cross-examination and measured against the volume of prosecution evidence the jury has already absorbed. 

That testing has not yet happened. No verdict has been reached. No conclusion can be drawn. The defendants deny the charges. The trial before Mr Justice Garnham is expected to continue until the end of May. Labour Heartlands will continue to report each day’s proceedings.

Every trial has a defendant in the dock. This one has a more important figure who is not. According to the prosecution, “El Money” ordered the fires, promised the payment, and disappeared into the encrypted dark. Scotland Yard does not know who he is, or will not say. Military intelligence has offered nothing. The defendants may be convicted or acquitted. But who is the man at the other end of the phone remains the question.