Revelations that two Russian spies accused of a nerve-agent poisoning in Britain in 2018 may have been behind earlier explosions at a Czech ammunition depot that killed two people sparked outrage and anger in the Czech Republic.

The allegations by Czech intelligence have plunged relations between Prague and Moscow to their lowest level since the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in 1989.

Amid the escalation of tensions, Prague has expelled 18 Russian diplomats, and Moscow, which dismisses any role in the blasts and described it as a provocation concocted by Washington, has kicked out 20 Czech Embassy staff in Moscow.

It also comes amid a series of incidents that have roiled relations over the last few years, including claims, later dismissed, that Russia had smuggled ricin into Prague in 2020 to poison three municipal officials who had taken action or supported positions that angered the Kremlin, mostly to do with disputes over the Soviet role in World War II.

In 2020, the Czech Republic reported a series of cyberattacks on key institutions, including hospitals, that Czech intelligence suspected were the work of state-backed Russian hackers.

The fresh claims have triggered support for the Czech Republic and condemnations for Russia’s alleged role from the European Union, the United States, and others, including Ukraine.

For many in the Czech Republic, the alleged attacks by two officers of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service in Vrbetice in the southeast of the country in October and December 2014 was an act of terrorism, if not war.

Many of those voicing such charges are opponents of Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who has been dogged by corruption allegations — some involving EU subsidies — that he denies, and President Milos Zeman, one of the European Union’s most Kremlin-friendly leaders.

Just Some “Goods”

Babis, who along with another top official first made public the blockbuster charge on April 17 in an emotional address in which he stressed the loss of life and widespread damage, two days later took a softer tone.

Babis, accused but cleared in 2015 by a court of working with communist secret police in the 1980s, said it was an unacceptable operation by Russian agents that went wrong. “Russia was not attacking the Czech Republic. The agents attacked the goods of a Bulgarian arms trader, who was probably selling these arms to parties fighting Russia,” Babis told a news conference on April 19. “The ammunition was supposed to explode en route. Of course it is unacceptable that GRU agents were undertaking the operation here — which they bungled,” he said.

Acting Czech Foreign Minister Jan Hamacek on April 19 confirmed the trader to have been Emilian Gebrev, an arms-factory owner who survived an attempt to poison him in 2015. Bulgarian prosecutors charged three Russians in absentia in 2020 with his attempted murder.

Gebrev’s company, EMCO, denied on April 19 that it had made or planned any shipment from the Czech warehouse in the months before the explosion or for at least a year after the blast.

Prague has previously said the warehouse blast was caused by the same GRU agents blamed for the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain in 2018. Moscow denies involvement in the Skripal poisonings, which both victims survived.

‘Heinous’ Act

Babis’s apparent downplaying of the ammo-depot blast left many Czech politicians dumbfounded and spawned social-media memes ridiculing his comments.

“What Prime Minister Babis says is nonsense. An action resulting in deaths is an act of state terrorism, in contradiction with international law and the rule of bilateral relations in the 21st century,” said Pavel Zacek, a member of the opposition ODS party, in comments to Czech media on April 20.

Facing a backlash for the remark, Babis a day later said he was sorry for using the term “goods” and specifically said it was a “heinous and completely unacceptable terrorist act.”

Zeman, who holds less power than the prime minister, however, has been slammed not for what he has said, but for refusing to speak publicly on the matter yet. He says he will do so on April 25 during a TV program.

Zeman, who became the first directly elected Czech president when he took office in 2013, is rarely shy about sharing his views, often sharp-tongued, on domestic and foreign-policy matters. He has criticized Western sanctions on Russia and insulted journalists, among others.

Big blue letters reading “High treason” lit up Prague Castle, the official residence of the Czech president, on the evening of April 19. The message was delivered by a group calling itself Stop High Treason, which in a statement said it wanted Zeman brought before the country’s highest court to face charges of betraying the country.

A day after the stunt, Zeman’s spokesman lashed out at the country’s opposition. “A vote for the opposition is a vote for war. Remember that when you go to the polls,” Jiri Ovcacek wrote on Twitter.

The findings on the Vrbetice explosions by the Czech Security Intelligence Service (BIS) and the National Center for Combating Organized Crime (NUKIB) came amid efforts pushed by Zeman and his supporters to secure the Russian COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V, as well as support for the Russian nuclear energy giant Rosatom in its bid to secure a lucrative deal to build a reactor at the Czech Dukovany nuclear power plant.

Czech Health Minister Jan Blatny was fired on April 7 by Babis, whose government is dependent on Zeman’s political allies, a month after the president called for his dismissal for his refusal to use the Russian vaccine without approval by the European Medicines Agency.

Also losing his job in part due to his stance against the Sputnik V vaccine was Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek, whom Zeman dismissed on April 12.

Petricek had clashed with his rival, the aforementioned Hamacek, over control of the Social Democratic Party. Petricek had also suggested the party should cut its ties to Babis’s populist ANO party. Petricek had also opposed efforts by Zeman and his supporters to push Rosatom on the Dukovany contract.

At the time of his dismissal, Petricek said that “the minister’s office has windows facing east” on Facebook.

“Sometimes when you defy physics and other forces, you can look completely, calmly, and boldly toward the West and Europe,” Petricek said. “It’s no secret that I have not been well regarded by the Prague presidency for some time,” he told reporters.

Who Is ‘Facing East’?

Zeman has characterized the BIS as a bunch of “incompetents” and is on less-than-friendly terms with its director, Michal Koudelka, pressing him last year for a list of Russian spies in the Czech Republic.

Zeman has said he will not recommend Koudelka be given another term at the head of the BIS once his current mandate runs out this summer.

With Petricek out of the way, Hamacek — also still holding the post of interior minister — had reportedly planned to travel to Moscow on April 19 to negotiate on Russian deliveries of Sputnik V. Those plans were quashed after he and Babis announced on April 17 the BIS and NUKIB findings on the 2014 Vrbetice blasts as relations between Prague and Moscow plummeted.

And Russia was effectively shut out of the multibillion-dollar contract for Dukovany when Czech Industrial Minister Karel Havlicek announced on April 19 that Rosatom would not take part in security assessments before a planned tender.

However, the Czech news website Aktualne reported that not only had senior Czech politicians known about the BIS and NUKIB findings much earlier, on April 11, but a special session of the country’s security council had been canceled.

Asked why he had only canceled his trip to Moscow at the last moment despite knowing of the alleged Russian role in the blasts much earlier, Hamacek said on April 18 that he never had any intention of flying to Moscow, and that it had all been a “coordinated action.” That left few convinced and many suspected that those with friendly ties with the Kremlin were intent on at least delaying the release of the BIS and NUKIB findings.

“If the FM (Foreign Ministry) AB (Andrej Babis), Hamacek and others had known about Vrbetice for some time and still got rid of Petricek, after which Hamacek wanted to go to Moscow,” said Jiri Pehe, a longtime political analyst and director of New York University in Prague on Twitter on April 18.

“The whole affair begins to take on the dimensions of a huge political scandal, one in which treason cannot be ruled out.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

MOSCOW — Allies of ailing, imprisoned Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny have not held back in delineating the stakes of their latest standoff with the Russian state. A wave of protests planned for April 21, they say, represents the “final battle between good and neutrality.”

Members of Navalny’s embattled opposition movement, many of whom have fled Russia under the threat of incarceration, had planned not to announce new anti-government rallies until 500,000 people had registered online to take part. Strength in numbers, they said in viral clips posted online, was the only sure way to protect participants from police beatings and arrest.

But on April 18, as the online tally passed 430,000 and Navalny’s doctors warned he may have only days to live as he continues his hunger strike in a prison outside Moscow, his team shifted gear and named April 21 as the date for nationwide demonstrations they hope can force concessions from President Vladimir Putin’s government.

“Each of us, whether we like it or not, faces a choice,” Navalny’s team said in a video announcing the protests. “If we are silent now, Russia will be plunged into total darkness. Peaceful political activism in Russia will become impossible.”

A weeks-long crackdown since the previous protest wave in January, after Navalny was detained upon return to Russia following treatment for a poisoning attack he blames on Putin, has left many of Navalny’s remaining allies in Russia behind bars or under house arrest.

Now, authorities have moved to label his Anti-Corruption Foundation and his network of offices across the country “extremist,” a designation that, if upheld in court, will leave its staff and supporters open to criminal prosecution.

But turnout on April 21 may hinge largely upon whether the dangers faced by protesters, especially since lawmakers passed a flurry of punitive legislation aimed at radically curtailing the space for dissent, will outweigh any collective sense that the decisive moment to act in defense of political freedoms and in favor of change has come.

“The authorities definitely succeeded in spooking a proportion of people,” former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov, now a political analyst, told RFE/RL. “But Putin remains in the Kremlin, Navalny remains in jail, the regime remains authoritarian, and living standards are falling. And the reasons that previously made people take to the streets have remained the same.”

Gallyamov said a “protest core” of some 10,000 people is almost certain to come out in Moscow for the protest on the evening of April 21, hours after Putin delivers his annual state-of-the-nation address — a speech that comes amid deep international concern over Navalny’s condition as well as other issues, including a Russian military buildup in occupied Crimea and along the border with eastern Ukraine.

But a big question, Gallyamov contends, will be how much of the much larger “protest periphery” — the mass of occasional political activists who regularly weigh up the pros and cons of demonstrating and often decide last-minute — will opt to join the core at a time when the risks of doing so have significantly grown.

On April 20, Navalny was moved from his prison 100 kilometers east of Moscow to a medical unit on the grounds of another correctional facility nearby, almost three weeks into a hunger strike that he announced to protest a lack of treatment for acute back and leg ailments and a lack of access to his own doctors.

Aleksei Liptser, a members of Navalny’s legal team who visited the opposition leader shortly after his transfer on April 20, said the inmate looked emaciated. “He’s losing weight, and it’s clear he’s weak and struggling,” Liptser told RFE/RL in a phone interview. “He’s speaking much slower than he used to.”

As Navalny’s team works to convince Putin supporters and Russians who remain skeptical or simply indifferent to the fate of the opposition, some people have embraced extreme measures to prove how much they care.

More than 100 have signed up on Facebook to a mass hunger strike in solidarity with Navalny, and among those who are refusing food in a show of support are five parents whose children died in the 2004 school siege in Beslan, the legacy of which still resonates in Russia’s North Ossetia region.

“They’ve taken a man hostage and are destroying him. Our children were also taken hostage in 2004, and no one saved them,” one of them, Ella Kesayeva, told the Novaya gazeta newspaper.

Navalny’s team will also hope that public discontent has reached a level critical enough to leave thousands of Russians no choice but to protest. In video after video since Navalny’s sentencing to 2 1/2 years in prison on February 2, they have cited statistics showing declining real wages, an erosion of the influence of state-controlled television, the falling popularity of ruling party United Russia, and declining public trust in state institutions and in Putin himself.

Whether that message will have enough mobilization potential, analysts say, will depend on its force relative to the force of the state’s ongoing crackdown. The authorities have moved swiftly to thwart turnout at the mid-week rallies, arresting people who have promoted the protests and demanding that YouTube, the video-sharing platform, delete videos that mention them.

On April 16, the Moscow prosecutor’s office asked the Moscow City Court to uphold its demand that three organizations founded by Navalny — including the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Navalny’s network of regional political offices — be labeled “extremist” and banned.

Against that backdrop, Gallyamov said, the apocalyptic protest slogan that Navalny’s aides have chosen to rally the crowds on April 21 “is not plucked from thin air” but rather a very real reflection of ominous developments on the ground.

“It will motivate many people, including those who are vacillating or afraid,” Gallyamov said. “Some people might be thinking, ‘I can’t make it this time, I’ll join next time.’ But considering what’s taking place, there may not be a next time.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

PRAGUE– The explosion was massive, blowing out windows of houses kilometers away, leaving a smoldering crater in the eastern Czech forest, not far from the border with Slovakia.

The blast, on October 16, 2014, destroyed a cache of ammunition and related weaponry. The bodies of two men who worked at the site were recovered nearly a month later. A second explosion occurred about two months later at nearby location, about 1 kilometer away.

The incident rattled Czech authorities, who were already watching warily as 1,700 kilometers away, Ukraine was gripped in a ferocious fight with a separatist uprising that was stoked, and fueled, by Russia. If there was a known connection at the time, it wasn’t ever revealed publicly by investigators.

On April 17, however, Czech officials made a stunning allegation, drawing a direct line between the explosions and the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU — specifically, a division known as Unit 29155 that has been linked to assassination attempts and other subversive actions across Europe.

Coming as tensions mount in Ukraine over a massive Russian buildup of troops near its border, and with the United States hitting Moscow with major new sanctions, expelling 10 diplomats, the Czech announcement shook Prague’s politics and was likely to further roil Western relations with Moscow.

“There is unequivocal evidence about the involvement of officers of the Russian intelligence service GRU…in the explosion of the ammunitions depot,” Prime Minister Andrej Babis told an unusual night news conference on April 17. He also said 18 Russians working at the Russian Embassy were being expelled.

“The Czech Republic is a sovereign state and must react accordingly to those unprecedented revelations,” he said.

The president of the Czech Senate, Milos Vystrcil, a political opponent and longtime critic of Babis, suggested that the explosion could be considered an act of “state terrorism,” saying, “It is necessary to react clearly, confidently, and harshly on it.”

With the announcement, Czech authorities drew an indirect line not only to Ukraine’s war with Russia, but to a mysterious poisoning six months later in the Bulgarian capital that nearly killed an arms dealer named Emilian Gebrev.

Czech officials have not publicly announced a link between the explosions and Gebrev, but the public broadcaster Czech Radio and the news magazine Respekt cited unnamed security sources as saying Gebrev was involved.

Jan Hamacek, the Czech interior minister and current foreign minister, signaled that there was a connection with Bulgaria.

“Without specific details, I can confirm that international cooperation on this issue is under way, including cooperation with Bulgaria,” he said in an interview with CT24 Czech news.

And a top former Ukrainian security official also confirmed to RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that Kyiv had sought Gebrev’s help in acquiring ammunition in 2014.

Russian officials denied the accusations; the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman called them “hocus-pocus.” Moscow was expected to expel a similar number of Czech diplomats in retaliation.

“I cannot recall any single event over the past 30 years of Czech independence, since 1993,” having this significance, Pavel Havlicek, a research fellow at the Prague-based Association for International Affairs, told RFE/RL. “This will have numerous political, diplomatic, social implications for Czech-Russian relations.

What Is Unit 29155?

The link between the ammunition blasts and the Gebrev poisoning, if confirmed, would add explosive new details to a growing body of evidence surrounding Unit 29155 and the GRU’s overall activities across Europe.

Two other divisions — known as Units 26165 and 74455 — have figured into several international cyberhacking investigations. Both were named by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation into the hacking of political party computers in the United States in 2016.

They were also linked to efforts to hack into the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the latter of which has played a key role in investigating the use of Novichok and similar Russia-designed nerve agents.

Unit 29155, meanwhile, burst into wide public awareness nearly three years after the Gebrev poisoning, when a former Russian military intelligence officer named Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia fell suddenly ill in Salisbury, England.

Skripal had been convicted of treason in Russia more than a decade earlier, for allegedly passing classified information to Western intelligence. He was kicked out of Russia in 2010 in a spy swap involving undercover Russian agents working in the United States.

British authorities determined that the substance Skripal was exposed to was Novichok, a powerful nerve agent first developed by Soviet scientists. British officials, using closed-circuit TV footage and other data, accused two men they said were Russian military agents of being behind the incident, which also killed a British woman.

Reporters and open-source investigators, including the group Bellingcat, later pinpointed the identities of the men as Aleksandr Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, which U.S. and British authorities ultimately confirmed.

In October 2019, RFE/RL revealed further details about Unit 29155 when it uncovered photographs from a wedding hosted by the unit’s commander and attended by one of the two alleged Novichok poisoners.

On April 17, at the same time that Babis and Czech officials were announcing the findings of the depot explosion investigation, Czech police released a statement saying Petrov and Boshirov had been in eastern Czech Republic in October 2014, around the time of the explosions, and said they were wanted for questioning.

The Bulgaria Connection

On April 28, 2015, while at a dinner at a luxury restaurant in Sofia, Gebrev began vomiting and was rushed to a military hospital, where he suffered from intense hallucinations. He ultimately fell into a coma. His son also fell ill suddenly, as did an executive at Gebrev’s arms trading company EMCO.

Gebrev ultimately recovered. Bulgarian investigators made little headway in identifying a cause, or culprit, for his illness — until some three years later, after the Skripal poisoning.

Working with the FBI, British intelligence, and other agencies, Bulgarian authorities concluded that a door handle of a car that belonged to Gebrev and which was parked in a Sofia parking garage had been smeared with a substance by an unknown man.

Bellingcat said that a known Russian operative who had traveled to England around the same time as the Skripal poisoning had also traveled to Bulgaria repeatedly. The man is believed to part of Unit 29155.

In January 2020, Bulgarian prosecutors charged three Russians for their alleged role in trying to poison Gebrev.

Gebrev’s role in trying broker weapons sales to Ukraine isn’t fully understood. News reports say Gebrev’s company, EMCO, indeed had signed a contract with the Ukrainian government in 2014 to supply artillery ammunition.

However, Viktor Yahun, who was deputy chief of the Secret Service of Ukraine, the country’s main intelligence unit, said that Kyiv in October 2014 had sought to acquire ammunition from Bulgaria around the time of the Czech depot explosions.

“This businessman who was poisoned and was allegedly poisoned by the Russian intelligence services, he was searching for such ammunition in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, and the best place for their transit storage before sending to Ukraine was, in fact, the Czech Republic,” Yahun said in an interview with RFE/RL.

“After the explosions, both Czech law enforcement and we ourselves had suspicions that it might not have been a coincidence,” he said.

Gebrev did not immediately respond to phone calls and text messages from RFE/RL’s Bulgarian Service seeking comment.

Despite announcing charges against the three Russians in January 2020, Bulgaria’s prosecutor-general nine months later announced that the probe had been suspended, a move that raised eyebrows inside and outside Bulgaria.

Boyko Noev, a former defense minister who is known to be close to Gebrev, said the revelation highlighted major problems with the Bulgarian investigation.

“The latest findings in the Czech Republic bring up again the question: Why was the investigation of Gebrev’s poisoning systematically hindered and finally stopped?” he said.

Czech Case

After stalling for nearly three years with insufficient evidence, the Czech investigation into the explosions gained new momentum after the 2018 Salisbury poisonings.

Czech relations with Moscow have been choppy in recent years, despite the open sympathies for Moscow by Czech President Milos Zeman.

Bilateral relations took a decided turn for the worse in early 2020, when Prague city officials dismantled a statue of a Russian World War II hero. The two countries exchanged heated rhetoric.

With the Czech Republic having one of the worst COVID-19 infection rates in Europe, the issue of acquiring the Russian Sputnik V vaccine has also divided the government in recent months.

It wasn’t clear why the Czech authorities decided to move against Russia now, however, and make their allegations public.

The news magazine Respekt said investigators last year received new information regarding the explosion, and the government’s intelligence committee had discussed the case just two weeks ago.

Czech government officials suggested that among the fallout from the scandal would be the tender to build a new 6 billion euro nuclear power plant. After the state energy group CEZ canceled a plan to build new reactors in 2014, the government has been entertaining bids from China, Russia, the United States, France, and other nations.

But Russia’s involvement has been seen as problematic. Last November, a working group including intelligence officers and Foreign Ministry officials called for the government to bar Russia and China from the bidding, saying both posed a strategic risk.

On April 18, Deputy Prime Minister Karel Havlichek said the Russian state atomic agency Rosatom would not be allowed to participate.

The expulsion of the Russian diplomats follows the expulsion of other Russian diplomats from the United States, announced as part of major set of new sanctions aimed in part at pressuring Russia to back down from a buildup of troops on Ukraine’s eastern borders.

While the Czech expulsions do not appear directly related to the U.S. expulsions, the Prague decision was quickly welcomed by the U.S. Embassy, which said in a post to Twitter late on April 17: “The United States stands with its steadfast ally, the Czech Republic. We appreciate their significant action to impose costs on Russia for its dangerous actions on Czech soil.”

RFE/RL senior correspondent Mike Eckel and Bulgarian Service Director Ivan Bedrov reported from Prague; RFE/RL Ukrainian Service reporter Olha Kamarova reported from Kyiv.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON — Campaigning last year, U.S. President Joe Biden promised to be tougher on Russia than his predecessor, and so far he has been taking steps to live up to his words: Since he took office on January 20, the United States has hit the Kremlin with two rounds of sanctions over “harmful” acts carried out by Moscow during Donald Trump’s presidential term.

The latest measures, announced on April 15, were wide-ranging: the White House announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and imposed sanctions on six Russian technology companies as well as 32 other individuals and entities.

It also targeted ruble-denominated sovereign debt, a key ingredient in Russia’s economic activity and the topic of animated discussions about potential new sanctions for months.

The measures received praise from political analysts and members of Congress who said they sent a strong signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin, though some called for tougher measures, including sanctions to stop a controversial Russian natural-gas pipeline to Europe, Nord Stream 2.

But the Russian market’s reaction was muted, indicating the punishments will not be as painful economically as some had expected. The ruble even rebounded against the dollar as Biden pulled his punches on the debt sanctions, analysts said, leaving their impact uncertain.

“Still more bark than bite,” was the verdict in the title of an April 15 note from Evghenia Sleptsova, an economist at U.K.-based research firm Oxford Economics.

Since Biden emerged last spring as the Democratic presidential nominee and polls pointed to his victory over Trump in November 2020, anticipation had been growing that the United States would impose harsher sanctions on Russia’s economy, in particular by restricting the ability of U.S. banks and investors to buy Russian sovereign debt — bonds the government sells to raise cash for its coffers.

The logic for doing so was clearly laid out by the Biden administration on April 15, when the new sanctions were announced: “There’s no credible reason why the American people should directly fund Russia’s government when the Putin regime has repeatedly attempted to undermine our sovereignty,” a senior official said.

‘Largely Symbolic’

The smaller the pool of investors ready to buy Russian sovereign debt, the more expensive it becomes for the Kremlin to raise the money it needs, a development that has a ripple effect throughout the economy, affecting companies and consumers.

But the Biden administration chose to go with a relatively mild variety of sovereign debt sanctions.

When it takes effect on June 14, the measure will prevent U.S. banks from buying ruble-denominated, government bonds, known as OFZs, directly from Russia. It will not stop them from buying those same bonds on the secondary market, from Russian banks.

The effect on the market for ruble sovereign debt is likely to be “largely symbolic,” Sleptsova wrote in the note.

Investors’ expectation that the Biden administration could ban all ruble-denominated debt drove foreign ownership of OFZs to a six-year low of 20 percent at the beginning of April, down from 35 percent at the start of 2020. The large-scale selling of OFZs by foreigners drove the ruble to 80 to the dollar, near a record low, helping stoke inflation in Russia.

Russia currently has about $185 billion in outstanding OFZ debt, according to Vladimir Tikhomirov, a Moscow-based economist for investment bank BCS Global Markets, putting foreign ownership at about $37 billion.

U.S. investors own roughly between $12 billion and $14 billion of OFZs, he said, with European and Asian investors accounting for most of the remaining foreign-owned debt.

The sanctions don’t obligate non-American foreign investors to follow suit in steering clear of the OFZs. But Brian O’Toole, a former Treasury Department official and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, said that major European banks often implement U.S. Treasury sanctions, meaning that the potential knock-on effect could be greater.

However, when the Trump administration imposed a similar ban in 2019 on U.S.-dollar debt issued by the Russian government, there was no significant impact.

Sleptsova said that the Trump-era sanctions “did little to dent the Kremlin’s access to foreign funding” as Russia turned to issuing more Euro-denominated bonds. In fact, she added, percentage of foreign investors owning sovereign debt issued by Russia in foreign currencies actually increased after those sanctions were announced.

Russia Scales Back

The Russian government is much more dependent on ruble-denominated debt for funding its budget than on dollar-denominated debt, potentially making the new sanctions more robust.

A senior Biden administration official suggested the White House is hoping for a substantial knock-on effect.

“Judging from history, removing U.S. investors as buyers in this market can create a broader chilling effect that raises Russia’s borrowing costs, along with capital flight and a weaker currency,” the official said on condition of anonymity after the new sanctions were announced. “And all of these forces have a material impact on Russia’s growth and inflation outcomes.”

At the same time, the choice of a milder form of sovereign-debt sanctions may have been calculated to land a softer blow for now while keeping a more powerful punch in reserve.

In comments late on April 15, Biden said the United States “could have gone further” with the sanctions, but that he chose not to because he wants to avoid a “cycle of escalation and conflict.” But he warned that if Russia “continues to interfere with our democracy, I am prepared to take further actions to respond.”

Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance in Washington, said that could make some U.S. banks and investors cautious in the “near term” about buying Russian ruble debt.

“Some compliance departments will say, ‘You know what, it’s just not worth it,’” she said.

But as they currently stand, she said, the debt sanctions will have just a “minor symbolic impact.”

Oil Income

Putin has been preparing for a Western ban on sovereign debt ever since the United States and its allies began imposing sanctions on Russia in 2014, after it seized Crimea and backed fighters in eastern Ukraine. His government has curtailed spending growth and built up the nation’s foreign currency reserves to nearly $600 billion.

A plunge in world oil prices combined with those sanctions hit Russia’s economy hard in 2015. But this year, it is benefitting once again this year from a jump in the price of oil, its main export commodity.

The government had planned to borrow 3.7 trillion rubles ($48.5 billion) this year assuming an average oil price of $45 a barrel. To date, the oil price has been averaging near $60, potentially generating more than $25 billion in additional budget revenue, Russia’s Finance Ministry said in March.

In response to the new U.S. sanctions, Russia announced it would cut its 2021 borrowing needs by nearly a quarter, or by about $11.5 billion. The cut is greater than the proportion of its debt owned by foreigners.

“If we don’t see a meltdown of the global economy and a significant drop in oil prices, then Russia really doesn’t need to borrow that much,” said Tikhomirov. “So, they can easily adjust their policy and curb their needs for new debt.”

He said the sanctions would not impact his forecast for Russian economic growth.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Prominent investigative journalist Roman Anin believes that the newfound attention paid by Russian authorities to him and his media organization differs from the official line, and that recent raids on his home and office — and his subsequent interrogation — were in response to recent critical coverage of high-profile business and security figures.

Speaking to RFE/RL’s Russian Service on April 13 a day after his visit to the Investigative Committee for questioning relating to a story he wrote five years ago, the editor in chief of Important Stories (Istories) gave his assessment of what he sees as part of the “sad process in Russia of pressure on independent journalism.”

The April 9 seizure of computers and mobile phones from his home and and Istories’ offices by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, he said, had nothing to do with the recent reopening of the case centered on the piece he wrote in 2016 for Novaya gazeta that explored the connection between the wife of powerful Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and one of the world’s largest yachts.

That case had already been resolved, and resulted in the newspaper publishing a court-ordered refutation atop the article page that says the report was “untrue and discredited the honor and dignity” of Sechin, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin who is considered one of his closest allies. State-owned Rosneft is Russia’s biggest oil company.

However, the case was reopened in March and Anin is being investigated as a witness for “violation of privacy” through the abuse of his professional position, a development that has led to an outcry from media watchdogs and independent journalists in Russia.

Whoever is behind the case, Anin told RFE/RL, had “a task, including gaining access to all my documents, to my sources, to my correspondence, to, perhaps, future publications that we are preparing.”

The FSB took away everything he had touched, and many items that were not his at all, he said, paying special attention to English-language documents and anything related to his time spent abroad. Officers nearly walked away with a picture of him with fellow students at Stanford University in the United States, he said, before opting instead to simply take a photo of it.

“Of course, this was done in order to try to find something else,” Anin said.

His interrogation as a witness at the Investigative Committee three days later, he said, focused on two points: the editorial processes at Novaya gazeta, and queries as to how he managed to gain access to photographs from Sechin’s wife’s Instagram account that were published in the 2016 Novaya gazeta report.

“I said that Olga Sechina, having published these photos on the site, a public site, thereby disseminated them among an unlimited number of people,” Anin said. “And that it is clear that these photos, in fact, were published by her voluntarily.”

“Everything leads to the conclusion that they want to accuse me of publishing Sechina’s Instagram photos illegally and without her permission, which, in my opinion, is just a delusional construction,” he said.

The potential charges under Part 2 of Article 137 of Russia’s Criminal Code are punishable by up to four years in prison, as well as the deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for up to five years.

Istories specializes in investigative reports and lists among its recent articles an exposé into the wealth of Kirill Shamalov, Putin’s former son-in-law, as well as a report on the FSB surveilling imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. Another Istories investigation focused on deputy FSB head Sergei Korolev, and another on Rosneft’s purchase of a stake in Pirelli and Sechin’s role on the Italian tire giant’s board of directors.

“I can only say that any of these investigations could have become a reason to put pressure on the editorial board of Important Stories in the first place, and on me as the editor in chief and author of that text about the yacht,” Anin told RFE/RL.

Rosneft issued a press release on April 12 in which it said that it could not comment on the actions of law enforcement agencies, but alleged that the raid on the offices of Istories “was used by unscrupulous media to denigrate” the oil company and harm Russia.

“A large-scale information war has been launched against Rosneft and its leadership, in which foreign interests are also participants,” the press release said. “The smear campaign is aimed at discrediting the results of Rosneft’s activities, given its budgetary and system-forming role for the Russian economy, as well as its leading position in the global energy industry. Such information attacks are organized to reduce competitiveness and create additional sanctions risks not only for Rosneft, but for the country as a whole.”

Rosneft added that it had already taken a number of legal actions to protect its business reputation and shareholder value, and called on the media to refrain from “biased assessments” and to take “legal responsibility for publishing false information in relation to the company.” The company also said that the judgment by a Moscow court pertaining to the 2016 article published in Novaya gazeta “is exhaustive and confirms the fairness of the position of the plaintiff.”

Rosneft has recently filed several additional lawsuits against media outlets in Russia, including Dozhd TV, Ekho Moskvy, and Novaya gazeta. On April 14, Kommersant reported that Rosneft had filed suit against the newspaper Sobesednik and its journalist Oleg Roldugin.

Roldugin said on his Telegram channel that the case was related to the newspaper’s reporting in March on a Rosneft facility described as “Putin’s personal ski resort.” “Now it is definitely spring. This time Rosneft did not like this publication,” Roldugin wrote on Telegram, providing a link to the story. “Read and distribute before Sechin bans everything.”

As for his case, Anin told RFE/RL that he did not know the authorities’ intentions, but that “the laws in Russia are now formulated in such a way that any independent journalist, in fact, acts on the edge and sometimes even beyond these laws.”

“If they want to close Important Stories, they can do it tomorrow, no matter what excuse they have,” he said.

Written by Michael Scollon based on an interview conducted by Alina Pinchuk of RFE/RL’s Russian Service

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.