DISINFO: Anti-Russian campaign is the real reason behind the expulsion of Russian diplomats from Czechia
SUMMARY
The expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic aims to reanimate the anti-Russian campaign aiming to discredit Russia. Prague’s decision are an attempt to kill two birds with a stone: discrediting the producer of the Sputnik V and the best candidate for the completion of a new unit for the generation of energy in the nuclear plant of Dukovany. With those goals, an anti-Russian campaign similar to that of the Skripal case is being resurrected, and who knows if the downing of the Malaysian Boeing won’t resurface on the table. Those cases have a common thing whit this one: none of them has been adequately investigated. Sanctions have been introduced violating all the basic principles of the civilised world, particularly the principle of presumption of innocence. The investigation is not credible and was manipulated, and it is all about having any pretext, as vague as it may be, to impose sanctions, and the only beneficiary will be the US.
RESPONSE
The investigation by Czech authorities have established beyond doubt that GRU agents Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the same individuals considered responsible of 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).
The involvement of Russian state actors in the MH17 crash and the Skripal poisoning has been established beyond reasonable doubt. See here and here for our debunking of these claims. Contrary to the claim, all three incident have been thoroughly investigated and unequivocally pointed to Russia’s responsibility. By attributing the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic to dark interests -such as discrediting the Sputnik V vaccine, aborting the completion of the Dukovany plant, introducing sanctions or benefiting the US-, this pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative aims to deflect any Russian responsibility in the incident and portray Russia as innocent of any misdeed.
See other examples of these disinformation narratives about Russia as a faultless victim of the West, such as allegations about the supposed anti-Russian bias of international institutions -be it the OPCW, the World Anti-Doping Agency or the United Nations- which always falsely accuse Russia; the alleged Russophobia of the EU; the affirmation that it is NATO and not the Kremlin who is involved in the Donbas conflict; denials that Russia had any role in the poisoning of Sergey Skripal or the downing of MH17; or claims that neither the US Intelligence Committee report nor the Mueller report found any evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, that there is no proof that Russia tried to influence the Brexit referendum, that “absurd” accusations against Russia are an attempt to demonise it, that for the West Russia is an enemy that must be surrounded with military bases, and that the West invented Navalny’s poisoning to uphold the myth of aggressive Russia.