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A Bulgarian man who was found to be the ringleader of a Russian spy circle in the United Kingdom has been sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.

Orlin Roussev, 47, headed a group of five fellow Bulgarians who prosecutors said put lives in danger as they carried out operations in the UK, Germany, Austria, Spain and Montenegro between 2020 and 2023 on behalf of Russian intelligence.

The group targeted reporters, diplomats and Ukrainian troops and discussed kidnapping or killing Kremlin opponents in what Commander Dominic Murphy, the counterterrorism chief at London’s Metropolitan Police, said was “industrial-scale espionage on behalf of Russia.”

Roussev worked for alleged Russian agent Jan Marsalek, an Austrian national who is wanted by Interpol for fraud and embezzlement after the 2020 collapse of German payment processing firm Wirecard, prosecutors said.

His whereabouts are currently unknown.

Justice Nicholas Hilliard said that Roussev was involved in six sophisticated operations and had a stash of phoney identity documents that put his crime at the top of the scale.

He was sentenced to 10 years and eight months in prison after entering a guilty plea to espionage charges and having false identity documents.

Roussev was the first of the five to be sentenced in the Central Criminal Court.

His lieutenant, Biser Dzhambazov, 44, was sentenced to 10 years and two months for his plea to identical charges.

Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev, 39, were convicted by a jury in March of conspiring to spy for an enemy state.

Ivanova was sentenced to nine years and eight months.

Ivan Stoyanov, 33, a mixed martial arts fighter, admitted to spying for Russia.

The group living in England used code names from the movies, with Roussev calling himself Jackie Chan and Dzhambazov being dubbed Mad Max or Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Their underlings were dubbed Minions from the animated “Despicable Me” franchise.

But police said their fanciful pseudonyms masked a deadly serious group.

In one operation, members tried to lure a Bulgarian journalist who uncovered Moscow’s involvement in the 2018 Novichok poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury into a “honeytrap” romance with Gaberova.

The spies followed Bellingcat journalist Christo Grozev from Vienna to a conference in Valencia and the gang’s ringleaders discussed robbing and killing him or kidnapping him and taking him to Russia.

“Learning only in retrospect that foreign agents have been monitoring my movements, communications and home, surveying my loved ones over an extended period — has been terrifying, disorientating and deeply destabilizing,” Grozev said in a statement read during the four-day sentencing hearing.

“The consequences have not faded with time — they have fundamentally changed how I live my daily life and how I relate to the world around me.”

Roussev, who worked out of a former guesthouse in the English seaside resort town of Great Yarmouth, had a stash of spy equipment that police described as an “Aladdin’s cave” when it was raided.

They discovered spy cameras hidden in sunglasses, pens, neckties and cuddly toys that included a Minion.

Technology used to jam Wi-Fi and GPS signals was also found, along with eavesdropping devices and car trackers.

Dzhambazov, who worked for a medical courier company but claimed to be an Interpol police officer, was in a relationship with both the women, his laboratory assistant partner Ivanova and beautician Gaberova.

Gaberova, in turn, had ditched painter-decorator Ivanchev for Dzhambazov, who took her to Michelin-starred restaurants and stayed with her in a five-star hotel.

When police moved in to arrest the suspects in February 2023, they found Dzhambazov naked in bed with Gaberova rather than at home with Ivanova.

Both women claimed during the trial that Dzambazov had deceived and manipulated them.