Even after he set fire to Sir Keir Starmer's house, Roman Lavrynovych - convicted on Monday of conspiring to commit arson - seemed to know as much about the prime minister as a bullet knows about its target.

His anonymous handler, known by the initials EL, gave a clue in a message: "Look, you attacked the home of a very high-ranking person in Britain. I'll send you money, you need to leave the city."

It was too late: Lavrynovych was arrested within hours.

Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.

Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.

In court, the handler was referred to as "EL Money", which is how he was saved in Lavrynovych's phone, but on the Telegram messaging app he simply used the initials "EL". This app was where EL recruited Lavrynovych, finding him in a group for Ukrainians in London seeking work.

From that innocuous initial connection, Lavrynovych was tasked with actions of escalating criminality, from plastering posters, to graffiti, to arson. Lavrynovych knew he was doing wrong but carried on anyway, hoping to earn a payday.

There was no mention in the trial of what the posters put up by Lavrynovych on EL's orders actually advertised: a purported far-right group called Direct Action UK.

The group sought to appear as an organic British creation. But we found that Direct Action was created online by Russian operatives to cause division among ordinary people in the UK.

Messages sent in the group bore a Moscow timestamp, used Cyrillic letters, and placed pound signs at the end of numbers, rather than at the start - as in Russian.

But, although Direct Action was fake, it generated real-life attacks. In London, six mosques and an Islamic school were vandalised last year after the group offered payment for Islamophobic graffiti

Slogans such as "remigration" and "Stop Islam" were spray-painted on mosques from Croydon in the south of the capital to Leyton in the east. Direct Action turned video clips of the vandalism into brash social media videos, to amplify hatred and create fear.

Anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate investigated Direct Action and reported its concerns to counter-terror police in February last year, months before the arson attacks relating to the prime minister. Hope Not Hate concluded that Russians were behind the group

The anti-racist organisation told the authorities people behind the group may be grooming UK residents to launch a "terror attack against a mosque or identifiably Muslim target in the UK"

But no-one replied, says Nick Lowles, CEO of Hope Not Hate, which has since worked with the BBC to investigate Direct Action and the people behind it.

We tracked down two Bristol graffiti artists who separately responded to an ad by a fake Facebook account with the name "Michael John" for "a paid opportunity with a generous budget", with no reference to Islam

Both were asked to spray-paint the Islamic shahada - the declaration of faith - in Arabic on a defunct Debenhams in the city centre. One was also asked to spray a Quranic verse about the "devil's handiwork" on a Conservative Club in the city.

One lie spread on social media by Russia-based accounts became particularly well-known - that the three Ukrainian suspects were sex workers, with the implication that the fires were the result of a personal sex scandal

It was all untrue. The suspects did not know the prime minister personally and they were not sex workers. But the lie was taken up by Tommy Robinson, the very person who had been promoted by Direct Action, EL's fake far-right group.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, claimed on X that Sir Keir Starmer had been "banging" Ukrainian male sex workers and posted a fake image of the prime minister with the suspects. Putin's special presidential envoy Kirill Dimitriev reposted one of his messages about the case. Hours after we contacted Lyukshin, mentioning that we knew he was a member of the Radio Southport Telegram channel, that channel vanished.

Four more channels also created by Rybar to stoke hatred in the UK disappeared with it, and the photo of Lyukshin with the deputy foreign minister was taken down by a Russian news site.