EU in talks on further Russia expulsions

The EU embassy in Moscow was helping to coordinate the planning, a second EU source said.

“Hundreds of Russian [intelligence] agents are accredited in the EU as diplomats and operate also here in Brussels. Will EU leaders and the EEAS get serious, show some guts, and expel at least a couple of them?”, a senior EU diplomat also said, referring to the European External Action Service.

The Baltic states and Slovakia have led the way so far, expelling seven Russians in total last week.

“For us, EU solidarity matters,” Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said on Friday, after marking two Russians in Vilnius as persona non grata.

Poland is expected to follow suit this week, EU diplomatic sources said.

Bulgaria and Romania might also follow, they added.

And the UK was helping Czech diplomats make the case to allies that Russian spies blew up an ammunitions warehouse in Czech the town of Vrbětice in 2014, just as they tried to kill a former Russian spy in England in 2018.

When asked if the UK will expel any Russians, a British official told this website on Sunday: “We will continue to co-ordinate our response to Russia’s hostile actions with a wide range of international partners”.

But the British official noted London had already taken steps over the Czech attack, by summoning the Russian ambassador to complain.

And many western European allies were, in general, more “reluctant” to take robust action, an EU diplomat said.

The Czech Republic itself has ordered out 81 Russian diplomats and staff over the affair, while Russia, which denies wrongdoing, is expelling 110 Czech ones in retaliation.

The Czech foreign minister and several Czech politicians have also called for EU and Nato solidarity measures.

But its prime minister, Andrej Babiš, and its pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, have blunted Prague’s diplomacy.

Babiš initially downplayed the 2014 attack, which killed two Czechs, as a Russian botch job targeting a Bulgarian arms dealer.

Zeman, on Sunday, claimed the Czech investigation was inconclusive.

“We are working with two investigative theories – the first, original one, that there was an explosion resulting from inexpert handling of explosives, and the second that it was an operation of a foreign intelligence service,” he said on TV.

“I take both of these theories seriously,” he added.

“Zeman now openly stands on the side of Russia and has become its advocate,” Pavel Fischer, a senior Czech MP, told the Reuters news agency.

But Zeman aside, the Czech foreign ministry might also have been hampered by its own unprofessionalism, a Czech observer said.

When Russia tried to assassinate Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018, Nato and EU states expelled over 100 Russian diplomats in support.

But this came after “briefings and presentations by the Brits for their allies about the case, presenting evidence for diplomats of allied countries,” according to Jakub Janda, the director of European Values, a think-tank in Prague.

“It seems almost certain the Czech government did nothing like that,” Janda told EUobserver.

“There’s a threat other [EU] countries will be reached by the Kremlin’s … lies about the [Vrbětice] incident, faster than by the feeble communications of the Czech government,” he said.

Pattern of hostility

Meanwhile, whatever happens next, Russia’s attacks in Vrbětice and Salisbury were not isolated incidents.

Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the US have also expelled Russian diplomats in recent months, involving other espionage cases.

And the EU has blacklisted Kremlin officials for using chemical weapons to assassinate people.

“I still get angry about Salisbury because I know how near we came to very significant casualties … You imagine what would have happened if a kid had come across that material [novichok, a chemical weapon used in the 2018 attack] and spread it around,” Richard Moore, the head of British intelligence service MI6, told The Sunday Times this weekend.

Referring also to Vrbětice and to Russia’s recent military threats against Ukraine, Moore said Russian present Vladimir Putin’s “pattern of reckless behaviour” was MI6’s top security concern.

“It is why we have co-ordinated so closely with our allies to make sure we are getting firm messages back to president Putin,” he said.