MOSCOW/PRAGUE • Moscow has expelled 20 Czech diplomats in a confrontation over Czech allegations that two Russian spies accused of a nerve agent poisoning in Britain in 2018 were behind an earlier explosion at a Czech ammunition depot that killed two people.
Prague had on Saturday ordered out 18 Russian diplomats, prompting Russia to vow on Sunday to "force the authors of this provocation to fully understand their responsibility for destroying the foundation of normal ties between our countries".
Moscow gave the Czech diplomats just a day to leave, while Prague had given the Russians 72 hours. The Czech Republic said it had informed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and European Union allies that it suspected Russia of causing the 2014 blast, and EU foreign ministers were set to discuss the matter at their meeting yesterday.
The US State Department commended Prague's firm response to "Russia's subversive actions on Czech soil".
The row is the biggest between Prague and Moscow since the end of decades of Soviet domination of eastern Europe in 1989. It adds to tensions between Russia and the West in general, raised in part by Russia's military build-up on its Western borders and in Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014, after a surge in fighting between government and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine's east.
Russia said Prague's accusations were absurd as it had previously blamed the blast at Vrbetice, 300km east of the capital, on the depot's owners. It called the expulsions "the continuation of a series of anti-Russian actions undertaken by the Czech Republic in recent years", accusing Prague of "striving to please the United States against the backdrop of recent US sanctions against Russia".
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the attack had been aimed at a shipment to a Bulgarian arms trader. "This was an attack on ammunition that had already been paid for and was being stored for a Bulgarian arms trader," he said on Czech Television.
He said the arms trader, whom he did not name, had later been the target of an attempted murder. Bulgarian prosecutors charged three Russian men in 2020 with an attempt to kill arms trader Emilian Gebrev, who was identified by Czech media as the same individual.
Czech police said two men using the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov had travelled to the Czech Republic days before the arms depot blast. Those names were the aliases used by the two Russian GRU military intelligence officers wanted by Britain for the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in the English city of Salisbury in 2018.
The Skripals survived, but a member of the public died. The Kremlin denied involvement in the incident and the attackers remain at large.
Czech interior and acting foreign minister Jan Hamacek said police knew about the two people from the beginning, "but only found out when the Salisbury attack happened that they are members of the GRU, that Unit 29155". He said Prague would ask Moscow for assistance in questioning them, but did not expect it to cooperate.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab tweeted that the Czechs "have exposed the lengths that the GRU will go to in their attempts to conduct dangerous and malign operations".
A Nato official said the alliance would support the Czech Republic as it investigated Russia's "malign activities", which were part of a pattern of "dangerous behaviour".
REUTERS
