Opinion: A Seven-Year Fuse Blows Up Czech-Russian Relations
It is hard to know what is most surprising about the revelation that Russia was behind a Czech depot explosion: the timing, the scale of the Czech response, or the operation itself, says Honorary Professor Mark Galeotti (UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies). It can be disconcerting to discover you have been at war for seven years. The Czech government's announcement that Russia was behind an explosion in an arms depot in 2014 and consequent expulsion of 18 diplomats has not only brought new acrimony to Prague's relationship with Moscow, it also speaks volumes about the Kremlin's wider thinking. The blast and subsequent fire in Depot 16 in Vrbetice destroyed 50 tonnes of munitions and killed two workers. Originally assumed to have been the result of an accident, at a dramatic weekend press conference, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babi¨ announced that as of Friday, he had received "clear evidence" linking officers from the GRU, Russian military intelligence, was behind it. As a result, 18 Russian diplomats Prague identified as intelligence officers were given 48 hours to leave the country. Furthermore, the Czech police's organized crime squad (NCOZ) announced that the two alleged members of the GRU's now-notorious Unit 29155 were none other than "Alexander Petrov" and "Ruslan Boshirov," otherwise known as Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga, the men identified as behind the Salisbury novichok case in 2018.
