Telegram, 'trash fishing' and the Wagner plot to groom UK criminals for 'grey zone' attacks

How a Ukraine-backing millionaire's London restaurant was targeted by proxies of Putin's shadow army

- John Simpson & Duncan Gardham

Evgeny Chichvarkin first learned of the plot to burn down his Michelin-starred London restaurant when detectives from Scotland Yard arrived, wanting to ask him some questions.

The 50-year-old Russian millionaire owns Hide, which opened in 2018 and is a short walk from the Ritz on Piccadilly. Tables are dotted around an ornate staircase made from a single Swedish oak and diners can pick from a wine list of 8,000 options, including a jeroboam of Montrachet burgundy for £100,040.

One day in April last year, Metropolitan police officers turned up. “The police started to ask strange questions - like who lives above the restaurant and the shop,” he said.

The police told Chichvarkin there had been a plot to torch Hide and also Hedonism, the two-storey Mayfair wine emporium he owns. They had arrested eight men across London and the Midlands before the plan could be carried out.

Chichvarkin is a former billionaire who made his wealth in Russia running a mobile phone retailer before falling out with the Kremlin over his tax bill. He fled to the UK in 2008 and successfully fought deportation to Moscow, where he was charged in absentia over alleged links to organised crime in what he argued was a politically motivated prosecution. His mother was found dead with a head wound in her flat in 2010. Chichvarkin believes she was murdered.

The plot against Chichvarkin had been orchestrated by a small-time drug dealer from Leicestershire, Dylan Earl, who had been enlisted by the Wagner Group, a private paramilitary organisation that has operated as a shadow army for Vladimir Putin.

The group made global headlines in June 2023 when its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, advanced on Moscow in an apparent rebellion against the government over supplies and conditions for his troops in Ukraine. The rebellion was resolved in negotiations and, two months later, Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash.