DISINFO: Vrbetice explosion: Allegations against Russia are a pretext to target Rosatom and appropriate land belonging to Russian embassy
SUMMARY
There is no evidence that the ammunition depot in Vrbetice was blown up by the GRU. The whole Czech history is just a stupid false excuse for exacerbation: the expulsion of diplomats, the imposition of sanctions and, attention, to squeeze a piece of land from the Russian embassy and remove Russian "Rosatom" from a lucrative contract for the construction of the Dukovany nuclear power plant.
RESPONSE
Pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about the explosion in Vrbetice in 2014.
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 an 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). Their investigation concluded that six officers of the GRU, led by the head of the military unit 29155, general Andrey Averyanov, were involved in this operation. Two of them worked undercover as diplomatic couriers.
See similar disinformation cases: the anti-Russian campaign is the real reason behind the expulsion of Russian diplomats from Czechia; the US forced Czechia into quarrel with Russia; allegations of the Russian role in Vrbetive explosion are part of informational preparation for the new Cold war; Czech-Russian diplomatic row was staged to target Rosatom and deflect attention from a coup attempt in Belarus.