Suranovas told me the group had plans for more parcels. “They were asking about me sending three or four a month,” he says. He had been due to make another delivery the week he was arrested.
Moscow’s ability to deploy fully-fledged intelligence agents to the field was hugely curtailed after the 2018 Salisbury poisonings, when Russia deployed a nerve agent. The UK, EU and US expelled so many Russian agents then, a former European diplomat tells me they did “systematic damage” to Russia’s spy capacity.
That is when Moscow began recruiting people within Europe to do its dirty work. I have seen some cases where they have been hooked through harmless-sounding job offers on Telegram. But in the parcel plot, many were brought in by acquaintances in criminal networks.
“Russia is ramping up its operations so they’re turning to this model of contracting organised crime. It’s something they’ve done prolifically inside Russia for years,” says Elijah Glantz, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) security think tank.
The man who handed the parcels to Suranovas has a fraud conviction in Poland. Another suspect, who supplied vehicles, is under investigation for car theft across Europe. A third, who handled the explosives, served time for rape.
“There is a litany of online groups willing to do just about anything for the right price – and that’s what we’re seeing,” Glantz says. He points out that in organised crime operations, groups do not disclose full details of a job and those hired “very often” have limited information. “One question smugglers will never ask is: ‘What’s in the lorry?’ It’s kind of the way it goes.”
On 20 July, the first parcel Suranovas had posted burst into flames at Leipzig airport in Germany. It was the package bound for London, about to be placed on a DHL cargo flight. A second device went off before dawn the next day in a DPD truck just outside Warsaw, and one malfunctioned. The last ignited at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham.
No-one was hurt, but the damage was extensive.
The incidents were not publicised at first as investigators across Europe went to work, and the Telegram chat shows the Russian handlers were unsure what had happened. HK wanted Suranovas to call DHL and ask why a parcel had stalled in Leipzig.
Meanwhile, other deliveries continued. Two more suspicious parcels were sent from Warsaw to the US and Canada, then another two from Amsterdam to the same addresses. There were no explosives this time, so it is thought the group was testing new routes.
Investigators cannot be sure whether Russia’s ultimate aim was to bring down a plane, or to intimidate and sow fear in countries aiding Ukraine. But the White House was so concerned it contacted Russia “at a high level”, a former senior official under President Biden has told the BBC. The message went out to “knock it off” or face “consequences”.
Dovile Sakaliene, the former Defence Minister in Vilnius, remembers thinking the parcel plot was a wake-up call for Lithuania’s allies. “Because… not everybody was on board about the level of the threat we are facing through hybrid attacks.”
When Lithuanian police began rounding up members of the parcel plot they discovered a further cache of explosives, buried in food cans at a cemetery. There were drone parts, too, including mounts the cans could fit on.
Towards the end of our interview, I asked Suranovas what he thought Russia had wanted to achieve. He paused a moment.
“I think… it was probably a test of something; that they were preparing something bigger,” he said. “It was to show that their arms can reach deep and far. That they can do many things, and you won’t even know.”