Two Bulgarian men living in Greenford and Acton have been jailed for their part in an “industrial scale” Russian espionage operation, following a major investigation by the Metropolitan Police that exposed a spy ring operating across the UK and Europe.
Ivan Iliev Stoyanov, 33, of Greenford, and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev, 39, of Acton, were sentenced at the Old Bailey on Monday (12 May 2025) alongside four other Bulgarian nationals. The group received a combined total of more than 50 years in prison for conspiring to collect intelligence useful to the Russian state.
Stoyanov, who pleaded guilty to a charge under the Official Secrets Act, was jailed for five years and three weeks. Ivanchev, convicted following a three-month trial, received an eight-year sentence. Both men were described by prosecutors as “trusted foot soldiers” in a network that spanned multiple countries and targeted journalists, diplomats and foreign nationals.
The court heard how the group engaged in surveillance on behalf of Russia, including monitoring a former senior Kazakh politician living in Britain and gathering intelligence near a US military base in Germany believed to be training Ukrainian troops. They also tracked two investigative journalists viewed as critical of the Kremlin and plotted a demonstration outside the Kazakh embassy in London, as part of efforts to improve Russian ties with Kazakhstan.
Officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command seized hundreds of items during coordinated raids in February 2023. One key discovery was a 33-room former hotel in Norfolk, owned by the group’s ringleader Orlin Roussev, which had been repurposed into a covert operations hub containing concealed cameras, fake ID printers, listening devices and surveillance kits.
Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said the investigation uncovered “espionage on an industrial scale”.
He said: “The strength of the investigation into the group’s surveillance operations left the ringleaders – Orlin Roussev and Bizer Dzhambazov – with no option but to plead guilty to the charges they faced.”
Commander Murphy added that detailed analysis of over 200,000 digital messages and extensive physical evidence helped establish Roussev’s direct connection with Jan Marsalek, an Austrian national identified as working with Russian intelligence services.
He added: “This case is a clear example of the increasing amount of state threat casework we are dealing with in the UK. It also highlights a relatively new phenomenon whereby espionage is being ‘outsourced’ by certain states.”
The other members of the group sentenced were Roussev, 46, of Norfolk; Dzhambazov, 43, and Katrin Ivanova, 33, both of Harrow; and Vanya Gaberova, 30, of Euston. They received between six and ten years in prison.
