As could be predicted, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Wednesday that seven diplomats from the Baltic States and Slovakia, including one Latvian diplomat, must leave the country within a week. Last week, several Russian diplomats were expelled from these countries in solidarity with the Czech Republic, which expelled 18 Russian diplomats on April 17. In response, Russia expelled 20 employees of the Czech embassy.
It should be reminded that the diplomatic scandal began after it was revealed that several agents of Russian special services were connected to the explosion in an ammunition depot in Vrbetice in October 2014. Particular attention was drawn to the fact that among the suspected agents are the infamous admirers of the Salisbury Church spire and poisoners of Skripals who travel around Europe with the passports of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. The real names of both are Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, and they gained wider popularity by giving a rather surreal interview to Margarita Simonyan on the Russian propaganda channel Russia Today.
The blown-up warehouse contained ammunition to be delivered to Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian businessman. On April 28, 2015, a few months after these explosions, Gebrev got seriously poisoned. According to a joint study by Bellingcat, The Insider and Der Spiegel, Gebrev is likely to have been poisoned with the same Novichok-type poison that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with. This task was performed by employees of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU).
After this poisoning, Gebrev spent a month in a hospital but was poisoned again in the summer of the same year. This time, too, he managed to survive. However, after the case of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, England in 2018 grew widely known, Gebrev drew attention to the fact that the symptoms of his poisoning were very similar. The investigation revealed that at least one of the GRU agents was in Bulgaria shortly before the Gebrev poisoning. In early 2020, Bulgaria indicted three Russian GRU employees on charges of attempted murder of Gebrev. The names of the suspects were not officially named.
The Czech investigating authorities admit the possibility that Russia had information that Gebrev planned to sell this ammunition in Ukraine, so it destroyed and blew up the entire warehouse. Whether Gebrev really had such plans doesn't matter now, because the issue is something else. It's organizing an explosion (in fact, an act of terrorism) in another country.
A meeting of EU foreign ministers took place on April 19 this year, during which the Vrbetice incident was also discussed and united support was expressed for the Czech Republic's actions. Similar support for the Czech Republic in the "investigation into Russia's abuses" was expressed in an official NATO statement.
It should be noted that neither the EU nor the NATO statement mentions that any country should necessarily show solidarity with the Czech Republic. The decision of the Baltic States and Slovakia to expel certain members of the Russian embassy was a voluntary act of solidarity aimed at showing support to a country affected by Russia's specific understanding of international law, as well as a show of common vision of international norms and common action against those who intentionally disrupt it.
Adherence to stable norms of international law is an existential issue for Latvia, and any attempt to skew, devalue and destroy these norms must be considered a very significant threat. Unfortunately, Russia has long demonstrated a course to undermine the international order, destabilize the situation wherever possible, and see the creation of chaos as a special opportunity to achieve the desired result.
New facts are now emerging about many things that until recently seemed quite coincidental. Similar explosions are being re-investigated in Bulgaria; suspicions are growing about the intentional nature of the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski in 2010; not to mention the suspicious deaths of people inside Russia. All this does not grow the preconditions for the normalization of relations with Russia.
Russia can, of course, make a "strong protest" over "provocative, unfounded actions by the Baltic states" and put them on the list of "unfriendly" countries, but on April 26, Latvian Ambassador to Moscow Māris Riekstiņš very clearly stated on the radio station Eho Moskvi that there is no basis for the popular story in Russia that the collective West specifically wanted to build a hostile relationship with Russia, and therefore it does not matter what it does, because they simply do not like Russia.
Riekstiņš reminded that he had worked in Brussels since 2011 as Latvia's representative in NATO and remembered well that in all documents until 2014, Russia was a co-operation partner with whom to establish a respectful and mutually cooperative relationship. It was the events of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, the events in eastern Ukraine that were the turning point after which relations could no longer remain the same. Since then, the confrontation has only intensified from the Russian side. This is evidenced not only by propaganda in the media, but also by real action. For example, the aforementioned Vrebrice explosion case.
The Russian Foreign Ministry's phrases that "Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn continue to pursue an openly hostile course towards our country, in this case hiding behind pseudo-solidarity with the unjustified actions of the Czech Republic towards Russia," can hardly be seen as a call to "live amicably." Russia's growing aggression does not allow us to pretend that nothing is happening, or to blithely hope that everything will calm down. Of course, one can hope that things will calm down, and hopefully they will but, as the Russians say: better a hundred friends than a hundred rubles.
Therefore, it is better to show solidarity with the Czech Republic today and expect the Czech Republic to show solidarity with us if something happens to us, than to think that tolerant behavior will protect us from something. Russia respects strength and only a strong position can reduce Russia's desire to start some provocations here. You can't gain Russia's respect with cowardly pandering.
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