A seven-year-old sabotage operation, once filed away as an industrial accident, forced the largest wave of diplomatic expulsions in Czech history — and showcased Moscow’s standard response to being caught: deny, expel, deflect.
In October and December 2014, two explosions ripped through an ammunition depot in the Czech village of Vrbětice, killing two workers and destroying roughly fifty tonnes of stored ordnance. For nearly seven years, investigators treated the blasts as an industrial accident tied to careless storage. That changed in April 2021, when Czech police and the country’s domestic intelligence service, the BIS, announced the explosions were sabotage carried out by GRU Unit 29155 — a Russian military intelligence unit later linked to the 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England. Investigators concluded the goal was to destroy weapons stockpiled for eventual shipment toward Ukraine, then fighting Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. When Prague expelled eighteen Russian diplomats identified as intelligence officers, Moscow offered no counter-evidence. Instead it ran a denial playbook: branding the accusation a fabricated story — a claim invented and spread without factual basis, then repeated until it displaces the truth in public debate — expelling Czech diplomats in retaliation, and using state media to recast the episode as a distraction from unrelated news.
An Accident, Reclassified
The first blast at the Vrbětice depot, on October 16, 2014, killed two employees of the private firm that managed the site and triggered a fire that burned for days. A second explosion followed on December 3, destroying a separate section of the facility. Czech authorities spent years treating both as an industrial mishap, the likely product of unsafe storage practices at a site that, unusually, was rented out by the state to a private arms-trading company.
That assessment collapsed on April 17, 2021, when Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and First Deputy Prime Minister Jan Hamáček announced that police and the BIS had reached a well-grounded suspicion that officers of the GRU’s Unit 29155 were behind the explosions. A Bellingcat investigation published days later identified two of the operatives as Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin — the same GRU officers, travelling under the aliases “Ruslan Boshirov” and “Alexander Petrov,” who poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury four years later. Czech investigators found the pair had entered the country on genuine Russian passports issued under Moldovan and Tajik cover identities, posing as arms buyers for the “People’s Guard of Tajikistan” seeking access to the restricted depot in the days surrounding the first blast.
The Averyanov Connection
Follow-up reporting by Bellingcat placed Colonel General Andrei Averyanov, the GRU’s deputy chief and commander of Unit 29155, in the region at the exact time of the operation, departing for Moscow within hours of the first explosion. Averyanov’s unit has since been tied to a string of sabotage and assassination operations across Europe, including the 2015 poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev — whose company had matériel stored at Vrbětice — and a foiled 2016 coup plot in Montenegro timed to block the country’s NATO accession. Investigators came to view Vrbětice not as an isolated act but as one node in a sustained GRU campaign to interdict the flow of Soviet-era ammunition toward buyers supplying Ukraine’s military as it fought Russian-backed forces in the Donbas.
Denial, Expulsion, Deflection
Moscow’s response followed a now-familiar sequence rather than a rebuttal built on evidence. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the Czech findings a “caricature” and a “swiftly concocted fake”, telling reporters that Prague’s refusal to share its investigative file with Moscow proved the case was invented — even though intelligence services routinely withhold sourcing to protect methods and sources. Russian diplomats quoted by the state news agency TASS later described Czech requests for compensation as tantamount to “extortion” and claimed Russian counterintelligence had found no proof Russian nationals were ever at the site. Rather than engage the specifics, Zakharova also suggested the timing of the Czech announcement was designed to bury an unrelated story about an alleged coup plot in Belarus — a deflection technique common to Kremlin crisis communications.
Prague’s expulsion of eighteen officers identified as Russian intelligence personnel was, at the time, the largest single expulsion in Czech-Russian relations. Moscow retaliated in kind, declaring twenty Czech diplomats persona non grata, a disproportionate response given the smaller Czech mission in Moscow, which effectively gutted the embassy’s operating capacity. The European Union issued a statement of solidarity with Prague and condemned Russia’s retaliatory expulsions, and several member states followed with their own coordinated expulsions of Russian personnel.
Outcome and Legacy
Czech police issued international arrest warrants for Chepiga and Mishkin, who remain in Russia beyond the reach of extradition. Analysts at Poland’s OSW Centre for Eastern Studies concluded the case reshaped Czech domestic politics, hardening the country’s posture toward Moscow and accelerating debate over Russian energy and infrastructure contracts. More broadly, Vrbětice cemented Unit 29155’s reputation as a dedicated GRU sabotage-and-assassination unit whose operations in Salisbury, Sofia, Podgorica, and Vrbětice share a signature method: field operatives, plausible cover identities, and a Moscow response built entirely on denial rather than disproof.
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