The Wild Russian Plot to Burn a London Restaurant and Kidnap Its Owner

Europe|The Wild Russian Plot to Burn a London Restaurant and Kidnap Its Owner

When Hide opened in London’s exclusive Mayfair district in 2018, the restaurant made headlines for its twisting bespoke timber staircase, its lavish wine menu and its rapidly won Michelin star.

Last year, it drew attention for another reason.

A group of small-time criminals in Britain were directed by Russian operatives to kidnap Hide’s Russian owner, Yevgeny Chichvarkin — a vocal critic of President Vladimir V. Putin — and to burn the restaurant and a linked wine shop to the ground.

The men were arrested before they carried out those orders, but not before they had completed a separate mission: setting fire to a Ukrainian-owned warehouse in East London in March 2024.

Thousands of messages discovered by the police after the group’s arrest, and made public during a monthlong trial at the Old Bailey courthouse in London, provide extraordinary insight into the workings of Russian operatives paying criminal gangs to conduct espionage and sabotage operations in Europe.

Cmdr. Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “This case is clear example of an organization linked to the Russian state using ‘proxies’ to carry out very serious criminal activity in this country on their behalf.”

On Tuesday, a jury found three men guilty of arson over the warehouse fire, and convicted a fourth man of failing to tell the police about the plans for Mr. Chichvarkin and his businesses. The two ringleaders of the group, Dylan Earl and Jake Reeves, had already admitted their roles in the extraordinary plot.