DISINFO: The US forced Czechia into quarrel with Russia
SUMMARY
The Czech scandal fits absolutely into the strip of entire American events, from the attempted coup in Belarus and ending with the destabilisation in the Donbas. The Czechs themselves could not have come up with such an event. They simply did not need it. But if they really wanted to quarrel with Russia, they would have found another reason.
It is the Americans who stand behind the task, and the Czechs were the ones who acted. The way the Czechs did it suggests that they deliberately demonstrated absurdity in this situation in order to show that they had nothing to do with it and that they were forced by the Americans.
RESPONSE
This is part of a disinformation campaign about the events surrounding the Vrbetice explosion in 2014 and the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic in April 2021, after the involvement of Russian state actors was established by Czech authorities. The claim attempts to ridicule the revelations about GRU's involvement by launching groundless claims that the Czech actions were forced by the US.
The investigation by Czech authorities established beyond doubt that GRU agents Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the same individuals considered responsible for the attempted murder of Sergey Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, were behind the explosion in an ammunition storage depot in the Czech location of Vrbetice in 2014, which killed two people. According to investigators, an email supposedly from the National Guard of Tajikistan had requested permission for two individuals - ”Ruslan Tabarov” from Tajikistan and “Nicolaj Popa” from Moldova - to visit the storage site and included the scanned image of two false passports with the pictures of both men. The images of “Tabarov” and “Popa” matched those of Chepiga and Mishkin.
Prague's findings were independently corroborated by a joint investigation conducted by Bellingcat, The Insider (Russia), Der Spiegel (Germany), and Respekt.cz (Czech Republic). Bellingcat announced already in 2020 that members of Unit 29155 were present in Czechia during the period when a large arms depot exploded in northern Moravia. In this regard, claims that the current tensions in Czechia-Russia relations have something to do with the US are groundless.