Czech Republic expels 18 Russian diplomatic staff for 'spying'
Czech security services said the 18 staffers, who have been given 48 hours to pack their bags, were "clearly" identified as Russian military spies in connection with a massive explosion that took place in the country in 2014.
www.euronews.com
In October of 2014, a warehouse in an Ammunition Depot containing 50 tons of ammunition caught fire and exploded, killing two depot employees and spreading debris up to 800 meters away. Several hundred people were evacuated for a couple of days as the site was secured. Then in December of the same year a second warehouse containing 13 tons of munitions in the same depot exploded. This warehouse which contained artillery ammunition and submachine guns, was located less then a mile from the epicenter of the previous blast. Investigators for the Depot stated the explosion could not of occurred on its own. The ensuing cleanup of the site was only finished in October of 2020 at a cost of almost fifty million dollars.
According to an investigation by Czech Security Information Service and Police of the Czech Republic, Russian GRU agents engineered the ammunition depot explosions and these allegations were made public on April 17th and on the same day eighteen Russian envoys were ordered to be expelled from the country in relation to the explosions. Two Russian intelligence officers, Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga, were alleged to have been involved in the explosions as both arrived in Prague on October 13th and left on October 16th and visited the Ammunition Depot under false credentials/passes as businessmen with different identities. Mishkin and Chepiga were also allegedly involved in the 2018 Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom.
Various media oulets alleged these munitions were destined to supply opposition fighters in Syria, or to be made available to a Bulgarian arms dealer named Emilian Gebrev (who himself was allegedly poisoned by the GRU in 2015) for sale to the Ukraine military.