A British man has been charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service after alleged contact with Russian military spies, according to the Crown Prosecution Service. The charges against Joshua Cammidge, 31, came on Wednesday following his arrest last week by counterterrorism police. He allegedly received instructions from a suspected representative of the GRU Volunteer Corps, a group controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency, with the intent to commit an act of sabotage. Cammidge is set to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court on Thursday.
Frank Ferguson, Chief Crown Prosecutor for the CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division, said: “Prosecutors have worked to establish that there is sufficient evidence to bring the case to court and that it is in the public interest to pursue criminal proceedings.” Metropolitan Police said the British national was arrested by London Counter Terrorism and Wiltshire Police officers at an address on Friday in Swindon, a town in southwest England. He was then taken to a London police station while officers conducted searches of a different Swindon address. The following day, he was further detained under the United Kingdom’s National Security Act. The United Kingdom deemed the GRU Volunteer Corps a national security threat in July for collecting foreign intelligence and conducting hostile covert operations on behalf of Russian military spies.
Support for the GRU was banned under a new law intended to give the government more powers to tackle proxy organisations carrying out hostile activity on behalf of foreign states. Supporters convicted of assisting the group face up to 14 years in prison. GRU has been blamed by UK authorities for hostile activities against the country and allies that include the 2018 Salisbury nerve agent attack and wider sabotage and intelligence operations across Europe. Security Minister Dan Jarvis said the UK would take “whatever action is necessary” to defend against Russian threats. “Anyone attempting to undermine our security will feel the full force of the law,” he said in a statement.
Relations between Britain and Russia have deteriorated sharply since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with British authorities increasingly warning about alleged Russian espionage, sabotage and other hostile state activity. Last month, Russia warned it could strike British military targets in response to Ukrainian attacks using British-supplied long-range missiles.
