The European Union condemned Russia’s expulsion of 20 Czech diplomats from their embassy in Moscow, and the Czech Republic responded by expelling Russian diplomats of their own. This week’s events mark a deepening of the worst diplomatic row between the two countries since the end of the Cold War.
The origins of the diplomatic hostilities lie back in 2014, when two explosions rocked an ammunitions facility in the eastern Czech Republic, killing two and leading to the evacuation of several hundred. The explosion was assumed by most to have been an accident until 17 April 2021, when Czech prime minister Andrej Babis accused the GRU (Russian military intelligence) of orchestrating the attacks, linking them back to two individuals using the names Ruslan Borishov and Alexander Petrov. Those two individuals are most infamous for carrying out a 2018 nerve agent attack on English soil against an ex-Russian spy and his daughter. The attack in England was a failure, killing two innocent b