UK fighters’ phone signal ‘led to strike’ at training site

Numbers starting with +44 may have been detected by mercenaries before deadly attack near Polish border

BRITISH volunteer fighters are feared to have triggered a deadly airstrike on a Ukrainian military base after their phones were detected in the area, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

At least 35 people were killed, potentially including three British ex-special forces troops, when 30 Russian cruise missiles pulverised the Yavoriv facility, near the Polish border, last Sunday.

The target on the base is believed to have been the International Centre for Peacekeeping and Security, where Ukraine has been training foreign civilian recruits for its international brigade.

Now, The Telegraph has learnt that around 12 to 14 phone numbers starting with +44 were visible to surveillance equipment in the area in the hours before the missile strike.

Security sources said mercenaries paid by the Wagner Group, a secretive military company with links to the Kremlin, are suspected of operating on the ground at the time.

It has raised fears that the hired guns were able to use their own scanning equipment to intercept the numbers and pass them to Russian intelligence, which linked the details to former British military personnel and immediately ordered an attack.

Mobile phone numbers can become visible to snooping technology when the device pings a nearby phone mast to connect to the network so a user can make calls or send texts.

Russia is thought to have access to a vast trove of phone numbers linked to elite British units, compiled through secretive surveillance operations near military bases in the UK.

Many of the British men who have volunteered to join the resistance against Vladimir Putin’s invasion formerly served with these units, meaning their numbers would immediately set off alarm bells in the Kremlin if spotted connecting to a Ukrainian phone network.

A source said: “As soon as Moscow got any whiff of possible British presence on the base, they would have immediately ordered a strike.” The attack on the base, one of Putin’s furthest forays west in the three-week-old war, lays bare the risks facing British recruits if they travel into the war zone, particularly if they fail to exercise caution with their electronic devices.

There is also concern that the burgeoning volunteer force who responded to the call to arms of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, has been easily infiltrated by Russian spies.

“There was potentially a mole placed in the unit [on the Yavoriv base] who was seen running from the camp around 30 minutes before the attack, with a laptop and kit,” a source said.

British volunteers who, by a stroke of fortune, left the base just hours before the attack told The Telegraph earlier this week that they were alarmed at the chaotic nature of the operation to prepare foreign recruits.

Carl Walsh, from the Rhondda Valley, and Ollie Funnell, from Eastbourne, East Sussex, claimed they received assurances in advance from Ukrainian officials that they could join the international brigade as medics.

However, the men arrived at the base to be told they would instead be sent to fight in the battle of Kyiv after just 48

‘As soon as Moscow got any whiff of possible British presence on the base, they would have ordered a strike’

hours of training – even if they did not have a military background.

Mr Walsh, a 50-year-old former combat medical technician, said: “They didn’t even have weapons in camp to train with.”

Britain has not deployed any troops to Ukraine to avoid being drawn directly into direct conflict with Russia, but scores of former military personnel have travelled to either join the fighting or help to train and support local troops.

A “small number” of serving soldiers are known to have gone absent without leave to try to enter the battlefield, the British Army admitted earlier this month.

It has ramped up anxiety that the capture or killing of any disobedient British troops could be used by Russia to claim Britain has entered the war.

Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, warned that any troops who leave to fight in Ukraine will face prosecution on their return.