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BERLIN — Arms that Czech authorities said were blown up by Russian agents in 2014 — an accusation that sparked a diplomatic feud between the two countries over the weekend — belonged to a Bulgarian weapons dealer who was mysteriously poisoned six month later, his company confirmed Monday.
The connection between arms dealer Emilian Gebrev and the consignment that was targeted in the Czech Republic deepens the mystery around a series of operations in Europe that have been linked to a team of Russian intelligence agents in recent years.
Andrej Babis, the Czech prime minister, said on Saturday there was a “reasonable suspicion” of the involvement of Russian military intelligence unit 29155 in a 2014 munitions warehouse explosion, which killed two Czech civilians.
The country’s police force released photos of two agents who have been linked to several attacks on NATO soil, including the poisoning of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia using the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
Bellingcat, the investigative reporting organization that first named the agents as members of unit 29155, has also linked the team to the 2015 poisoning of Grebev and his son after a substance was smeared on their car door.
“We can confirm that part of the materiel which was blown up in the Czech Republic in 2014 was our property,” EMCO, Gebrev’s company, said in a statement.
The firm denied reports in the Czech media that the arms — and Grebev — might have been targets for Moscow because the weapons were destined for Ukraine or Syria. The company said it had no plans to transport the material in the warehouse to Bulgaria or any other country.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that Moscow “categorically rejects” the Czech allegations, which he called “provocative and unfriendly.”
The Czech Republic on Saturday expelled 18 Russians, all of whom it accused of being spies. Russia expelled 20 Czech diplomats late Sunday.
The scandal underscores the suspected scope of Russian intelligence attacks on NATO soil in recent years. The United States last week expelled 10 Russian diplomats and imposed sanctions over Russian cyberattacks, election interference and other activities.
Reverberations continued Monday as Czech Deputy Prime Minister Karel Havlicek said Russia’s state nuclear authority, Rosatom, would be barred from bidding on upgrades to the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant.
The Russian expulsions will leave just a handful of Czech diplomats in Moscow.
[Russia to expel 10 U.S. diplomats in response to Biden administration sanctions]
The two GRU agents were named by police in Czech media as Aleksander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga.
According to the reports, Chepiga and Mishkin flew to Prague from Moscow on Oct. 13, 2014, three days before the explosion. The pair had allegedly emailed requests to visit the munitions depot in advance and used passports with cover names. The window of their planned visit coincided with the blast.
The two men used two different sets of cover names and two different sets of passports during their trip, according to the reports. The identity documents they used to cross the border were not the same as those they used to access the munitions depot.
Milos Vystrcil, the head of the Czech Senate, Sunday called the action “a very serious act of hostility and aggression” that could be described as “state terrorism.” Jiri Sedivy, a former chief of the general staff, compared it to a military attack on the country.
Russia’s foreign ministry reacted furiously to the Czech accusations, saying the decision to expel Russian diplomats was made on “groundless and far-fetched pretexts.”
“This hostile step follows a series of anti-Russian actions taken by Czechia in recent years,” the ministry said in a statement. It said the move would destroy normal relations between the two countries.
The explosions in Vrbetice were a mystery for many years. Czech media linked the attack to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and fomenting of a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and said arms in the depot were destined for Ukraine.
Christo Grozev, an investigator with Bellingcat, tweeted that its reporting had established that Chepiga was in Prague at the same time as the explosion using geolocation data. He said the organization had discovered that several more members of unit 29155 visited the Czech Republic at the time of the blasts.
Bellingcat has also reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Mishkin and Chepiga with Hero of Russia medals in late 2014 or early 2015.
Russia’s foreign ministry said the Czech expulsions of its diplomats seemed designed to please Washington. It followed Poland’s decision Friday to expel three Russian diplomats in solidarity with the U.S. expulsions of 10 Russians. Moscow announced it would send home five Polish diplomats in retaliation.
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