PRAGUE — The Czech Republic has called on fellow European Union and NATO members for “solidarity” action to support it amid a diplomatic spat between Prague and Moscow over Czech claims that Russian military agents were behind a deadly 2014 explosion at a Czech arms depot.
“We are calling for collective action by EU and NATO countries aimed at solidarity expulsions,” acting Foreign Minister Jan Hamacek said on April 20, a day after 18 Russian diplomats identified by Czech intelligence as being intelligence operatives left their posts in Prague, while 20 Czech Embassy employees in Moscow were ordered to leave by Moscow.
The tit-for-tat moves over the Czech allegations have triggered Prague’s biggest dispute with Russia since the 1989 end of communist rule, putting the small Central European NATO member at the center of rising tensions between Moscow and the West.
Hamacek told reporters he had summoned Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Zmeyevsky to protest what Prague views as a disproportionate response.
“It is only logical that if the Czech Republic takes further action, the Russian ambassador must be the first to hear it,” the minister said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected Prague’s “baseless accusations” and called the Czech moves “unreasonable and harmful to bilateral relations.”
The Czech government has already decided to eliminate Russia’s state-run corporation Rosatom from a multibillion-dollar tender to build a new unit at the Dukovany nuclear power plant and to no longer consider buying the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19.
Citing Czech intelligence, the government said that the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, orchestrated the explosion in the eastern town of Vrbetice in 2014. An October 16 blast set off 50 metric tons of stored ammunition, killing two people. Two months later, another explosion of 13 tons of ammunition occurred at the same site.
In connection with the October 2014 blast, Czech police said they were seeking two suspected Russian agents also identified as suspects in the 2018 poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in England.
Speaking to parliament on April 20, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis apologized for saying the previous day that the 2014 attack was “not an act of state terrorism” but was aimed at goods belonging to a Bulgarian arms dealer.
“That was an unfortunate choice of words,” Babis told lawmakers.
The European Union on April 19 said it stood in “full support and solidarity” with the Czech Republic and expressed concern about “the repeating negative pattern of dangerous malign behavior by Russia in Europe.”
“Russia must stop with these activities, which violate well-established international principles and norms and threaten stability in Europe,” Peter Stano, the lead spokesman for the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, said following talks between the bloc’s foreign ministers on the matter.
Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, and his daughter Yulia nearly died after being exposed to what British authorities later concluded was Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent. A British woman who accidentally came into contact with the substance died.
Britain’s NATO allies responded to the Skripal poisoning by imposing sanctions on Russia and expelling diplomats.
Women living in Iranian cities say they face frequent sexual harassment, catcalls, and verbal abuse — and many fear that those incidents mean they’re not safe from violent crimes. Though street harassment is illegal, the law is rarely enforced and few victims are able to prove that a crime has taken place.
A team of doctors seeking to examine Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has been turned away from the prison where he is being treated at an infirmary amid concerns his health is failing badly as he ends the third week of a hunger strike.
Anastasia Vasilyeva, Navalny’s personal doctor and the head of the Alliance of Doctors union, said on April 20 the group of physicians came to the penitentiary and requested to see the Kremlin critic, only to wait several hours without success.
“When we called with a request to examine the patient, we were told to come with passports at 8 in the morning. We have not been allowed in,” Vasilyeva said on Twitter.
The health of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic has rapidly deteriorated in recent days and he could suffer cardiac arrest “any minute,” Vasilyeva and three other physicians, including a cardiologist, said in a letter to Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service last week as they pleaded for access to Navalny.
Navalny was moved from his prison to a hospital in another correctional facility over the weekend, with his condition listed as “satisfactory” by prison authorities, the same designation they gave him days before he launched his hunger strike on March 31 to protest the lack of treatment he was getting over acute back and leg ailments.
Since then, his wife has warned that his weight was down to 76 kilograms, 17 less than when he entered the notorious Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow.
Navalny’s lawyer, who was allowed to see his client in the penal colony just for several minutes late on April 19, said his client looked “bad.”
Navalny’s case has further isolated Moscow at a time when U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has announced tougher economic sanctions against the Kremlin and the Czech Republic, a member of NATO and the European Union, has expelled Russian spies, accusing Moscow of playing a role in a deadly 2014 explosion at an ammunition storage depot.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on April 20 expressed concerns over the health of the jailed opposition politician.
“The German government, together with others, is pressing for him to receive adequate medical treatment,” Merkel told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Navalny’s colleagues and supporters have strongly criticized his transfer to the prison hospital, saying that the correctional colony he was moved to is in fact infamous for its brutal treatment of inmates.
His doctors have complained that prison hospitals don’t have the proper staff or adequate facilities to treat his ailments.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for a poisoning in Siberia in August last year with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent. He has accused Putin of ordering the poisoning, which the Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court in February converted a 3 1/2-year suspended sentence on a charge that Navalny and his supporters call politically motivated to real jail time, saying he broke the terms of the original sentence by leaving Russia for Germany for the life-saving treatment he received.
The court reduced the time Navalny must spend in prison to just over 2 1/2 years because of time already served in detention.
Merkel’s statement came as Russian authorities crack down on Navalny’s supporters and members of his teams across Russia ahead of a planned protest to support him on April 21.
Police in the city of Kurgan in Russia’s Urals Federal District on April 20 detained a coordinator of Navalny’s team in the city, Aleksei Shvarts, on a charge of repeatedly violating the law on organizing public events such as the April 21 rallies.
The day before, two members of Navalny’s team in the southern city of Krasnodar, Alipat Sultanbegova and Maryam Dadasheva, were detained for announcing the April 21 rally.
A member of Navalny’s team, Anton Overin, in the Siberian city of Ulan-Ude, disappeared on April 20 after he visited the city administration, where he planned to ask permission to hold a pro-Navalny rally on April 21. His colleagues suspect he was detained by law enforcement.
In the town of Berezniki in the Perm region, police visited local activist Artyom Faizullin on April 20 to question him regarding the pro-Navalny rally scheduled for April 21, but Faizullin refused to answer any questions, citing Article 51 of the constitution. The article says a person cannot be compelled to testify against themselves.
With reporting by OVD-Info, MBKh Media, Reuters, and Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has sharply criticized a “scandalous” request by Russian prosecutors to have the Anti-Corruption Foundation of imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny banned as an “extremist” organization.
On April 16, the Moscow prosecutor’s office asked the Moscow City Court to label as “extremist” three organizations tied to Navalny — the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Citizens’ Rights Protection Foundation, and Navalny’s regional headquarters. Prosecutors said the organizations were “engaged in creating conditions for destabilizing the social and sociopolitical situation under the guise of their liberal slogans.”
“The prosecutor’s office should immediately withdraw its request and end this latest attempt to silence and oppress any opposition and dissent in the country,” the statement said.
Under Russian law, membership in or funding of an “extremist” organization is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
“Pursuing an extremist label against these organizations takes the Kremlin’s persecution of vocal critics to a new low,” said Hugh Williamson, HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director.
“It is ill-founded, scandalous, and another sign of the Kremlin’s rejection of fundamental democratic rights and determination to hold onto power at all costs.”
The move is the latest in a series of assaults on Navalny since he suffered a nerve-agent poisoning attack in August 2020. He and his supporters blame that attack on Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives acting at the behest of authoritarian President Vladimir Putin.
Amnesty International in a statement on April 17 also criticized the move.
“Tens of thousands of peaceful activists and the staff of Aleksei Navalny’s organizations are in grave danger,” Natalia Zviagina, head of Amnesty’s Moscow office, said in the statement. “If their organizations are deemed ‘extremist’ they will all be at imminent risk of criminal prosecution.”
The Amnesty statement also decried Russia’s “long history of abusing ‘anti-extremism’ legislation and said that if the courts grant the prosecutors’ request on labelling Navalny’s organization “extremist,” “the result will likely be one of the most serious blows for the rights to freedom of expression and association in Russia’s post-Soviet history.”
Navalny spent weeks in Germany recuperating from the attack. When he returned to Russia in January, he was arrested and later sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were trumped up to hinder his political activity.
Navalny has been on a hunger strike in prison since March 31, demanding he be examined by his own doctor amid what his supporters have described as a “deliberate campaign” by prison officials to undermine his health.
A Moscow court has banned the public from a hearing in a case brought by Russian prosecutors to label jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny’s anti-corruption organization and its regional offices as “extremist” organizations.
The court ruled on April 19 that the case involved a state secret, but Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), said the Prosecutor-General’s Office had no evidence on which to base its claim.
Zhdanov also said the decision means Navalny’s associates will not be able to view the evidence filed in the case until the day of the hearing, set for April 26, in a special unit of the Moscow City Court. Only lawyers involved in the case can get access to the materials now.
The latest move against Navalny’s opposition movement comes as Navalny is in the third week of a hunger strike. The imprisoned opposition leader was transferred on April 19 to a correctional facility hospital amid intensifying pressure from the West.
Russian prosecutors last week accused the FBK, Russia’s largest opposition network, of working to create conditions for “changing the foundations of the constitutional order.”
It said the FBK operates “under the guise of liberal slogans” as it engages “in creating conditions for the destabilization of the social and sociopolitical situation.”
The extremist label, if approved, would severely limit Navalny’s allies and activists from organizing, criminalizing such things as calling for or participating in protests. Navalny’s aides and organizations are already subject to frequent police raids and arrests over their political activities.
The decision to close the proceeding comes as Navalny’s aides are pushing for massive nationwide anti-government protests on April 21.
Navalny was sentenced in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were politically motivated. He was arrested in January after returning from Germany, where he was treated for a poison attack with a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.
The Kremlin says Russian President Vladimir Putin will speak later this week at an online summit on climate change organized by the United States.
Putin will “outline Russia’s approaches in the context of forging broad international cooperation aimed at overcoming the negative effects of global climate change,” the Kremlin said in a statement on April 19.
U.S. President Joe Biden last month invited Putin and other world leaders to the virtual summit on April 22-23.
But since then, relations between Washington and Moscow have entered a new phase of heightened tensions with Biden announcing punishing sanctions over cyberattacks, election interference, and threats against U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Further souring the mood — and raising questions over whether Putin would attend the summit — has been the issue of the health of jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s buildup of troops along the border in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and new allegations of Russian involvement in a deadly explosion at a munitions depot in the Czech Republic in 2014.
Biden also invited Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has not yet said whether he will take part.
The gathering is meant to highlight Washington’s renewed commitment to stemming climate change, and build toward the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in Glasgow, Scotland, the White House said on March 26.
Biden rejoined the 2015 Paris Agreement on his first day in the White House, reversing former President Donald Trump’s exit from the landmark climate accord.
The White House has said that climate change is one area where it may be possible to cooperate with China and Russia, even as ties are strained over many other issues.
The United States and China agreed that stronger pledges to fight climate change should be pursued in line with the Paris Agreement, according to a joint statement issued on April 17 after U.S. climate envoy John Kerry visited Shanghai.
“The United States and China are committed to cooperating with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands,” the joint statement said.
Based on reporting by AFP, Reuters, and RIA Novosti
Facebook has removed Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov’s controversial post promoting a toxic root for treatment of COVID-19, calling it “misinformation.”
Japarov’s post in question, in which he announced that his country found an “effective” method to treat COVID-19, was posted on Facebook on April 15.
The entry contained a video showing men without protective equipment bottling the solution with the extracts of the aconite root, warning that drinking the solution while it is cold might result in death.
The post was later deleted from Facebook.
In answer to electronic enquiries from RFE/RL over the disappearance of the post, a Facebook spokesperson said on April 19 that the company removed Japarov’s post.
“We’ve removed this post as we do not allow anyone, including elected officials, to share misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm or spread false claims about how to cure or prevent COVID-19,” the Facebook statement said.
On April 16, Health Minister Alymkadyr Beishenaliev announced at a press conference that a solution with extracts of aconite root had been given to 300 coronavirus-infected patients.
He also sipped from a cup containing the poisonous root’s extract in front of journalists and said that “the solution is not dangerous for one’s health.”
The World Health Organization’s mission in the Central Asian nation harshly criticized the idea, saying that there’s no proof aconite root is safe for treatment of any illnesses, including coronavirus infection.
Several physicians who spoke with RFE/RL said use of the root to treat COVID-19 violates Kyrgyzstan’s law on public safety
Aconite root is found in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang and some parts of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Some people use the root in herbal soups and meals, believing in its health benefits. But aconite roots contain aconitine, a cardiotoxin and neurotoxin. Consuming aconite root can lead to sickness or even death.
Rafoat Hoshimova and her family moved out of their house in the northern Tajik city of Khujand six years ago after it was announced their neighborhood would be demolished.
City officials and private Chinese investors had signed an agreement to build a massive residential and leisure complex called Chinatown in the neighborhood, replacing its one-story houses with modern apartment blocks and recreational facilities.
More than 30 houses were bulldozed in the picturesque area on the banks of the Syrdaryo River when the project officially kicked off in August 2015.
The excited residents were promised new homes in Chinatown’s first buildings, which authorities said would be completed within one year.
The huge project would consist of 15 residential buildings with 1,200 apartment units, a four-story school, a car park, and a string of shops and restaurants.
An illustration of the planned Chinatown project
The project, which also included recreational and leisure facilities, was supposed to be finished in 2020. It seemed too good to be true.
It was.
Six years later, more than 300 people are still waiting for their new apartments while being stranded in rented homes or living with relatives.
Khujand officials say the Chinese investors abandoned the project in 2018 after complaining the area wasn’t suitable for a major construction project because of its proximity to the river.
It’s unknown why such a key issue wasn’t checked before construction, when the land was surveyed.
Officials at the Chinese company Husnoro-1, which was in charge of building the project, haven’t commented publicly since they withdrew from the project.
“It was such a letdown for us,” Hoshimova says. “We’ve been left in limbo. It’s very painful.”
Who’s To Blame?
Hoshimova and her husband, Komil, say that “it all happened in a big rush” when city officials ordered the residents of Rahmon Nabiev Avenue to “quickly” vacate their houses.
Komil, a migrant worker who was in Russia at the time, had to return to Khujand to sign documents giving consent for the demolition of his home.
The couple shared a large house with their two sons, daughters-in-law, and several grandchildren.
Rafoat Hoshimova
The three families were placed in a single rented apartment, sharing a kitchen and single bathroom. Despite the inconveniences, the family reluctantly agreed, in the hope it was a temporary arrangement. Initially, their rent was paid by Husnoro-1.
But alarm bells began to ring when several months passed with no progress at the construction site.
Hoshimova, who frequently visited the site of her former family home, recalls: “The only work they did was to demolish the houses and dig holes in the land. Eventually, the holes filled with water.”
That was the end of any work at the site. The worried residents approached city authorities to demand some clarification.
Several meetings were held with Khujand officials and Chinese investors in 2016 and 2018. Tajik authorities sought to appease people by saying the Chinatown project was still on track despite some unforeseen delays.
City authorities publicly acknowledged three years ago that the Chinese investors had abandoned the project. But officials didn’t give a detailed explanation of what had happened or who was to blame.
They pledged to provide permanent homes for affected families and pay their rent until the new homes were ready.
The families who lost their homes are no closer to the new apartment buildings they were promised in 2015.
Lives Put On Hold
In August 2020, the local government announced that new apartments were being completed in another part of the city to house the families who had lost their homes because of the project.
Hoshimova and others were told they would celebrate the New Year in their new apartments in Khujand’s 18th District. But it didn’t happen.
In February 2021, the mayor’s office said the families would move into their new homes in a nine-story complex just before Norouz, the Persian New Year, marked on March 21.
That deadline passed as well, with Hoshimova and the others still without their new apartments.
City officials now accuse the families of being partially responsible for the delays.
“They don’t want the apartments on the ground floor and they also don’t like the ones on the upper floors,” city spokesman Maamur Yusufzod said on April 13.
Many people in Tajikistan avoid living on the upper floors of tall buildings because they often have extremely low water pressure and there are problems with the elevators. The ground floors are also unpopular in some neighborhoods due to security concerns.
Yusufzod said the authorities had now decided to distribute new apartments among the families by randomly selecting them in a lottery.
Rafoat Hoshimova had hoped her grandchildren would have somewhere better to live and play by now.
Hoshimova said she had gained two new grandchildren since the family moved out of their home, with the children being raised in the cramped rented home.
Several others say they have had to postpone weddings and other major life events as they put everything on hold.
Meanwhile, the construction site has since turned into a garbage dump and the Chinatown project is officially dead.
Khujand city authorities are now promising to build a new residential complex — called Khujand City — with local investors. It will be just 100 meters from the site of Khujand’s ill-fated Chinatown.
Russia’s prison service says opposition politician Aleksei Navalny will be transferred to a hospital in a correctional facility near his current one amid concerns his health was deteriorating rapidly as he entered his 20th day of a hunger strike over his medical treatment.
“At present, A. Navalny’s health condition is assessed as satisfactory; he is examined by a general practitioner every day. With the consent of the patient, he was prescribed vitamin therapy,” the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) branch in the Vladimir region said in a statement on April 19.
Just before the weekend, Navalny’s personal doctor and three other physicians, including a cardiologist, pleaded for access to the 44-year-old in a letter to the FSIN, saying he could suffer cardiac arrest at “any minute.”
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, warned over the weekend that the Kremlin critic — who months earlier fell gravely ill after a poison attack with a chemical nerve agent — could die within “days” if action wasn’t taken soon.
Navalny’s situation is adding to already severe strains in Russia’s ties with the West. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on April 18 that the U.S. government had told Russia “there will be consequences” if Navalny dies in prison.
European Union foreign ministers are expected to discuss the Navalny case on April 19.
Josep Borrell, the bloc’s top diplomat, warned ahead of the meeting that the EU will hold Moscow responsible for the Kremlin critic’s health.
“We make the Russian authorities responsible for the health situation of Mr. Navalny,” Borrell said.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated after being poisoned in Siberia in August 2020 with what was defined by European labs as a Novichok nerve agent. He has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which the Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court in February converted a 3 1/2-year suspended sentence on a charge that Navalny and his supporters call politically motivated to real jail time, saying he broke the terms of the original sentence by leaving Russia for Germany for the life-saving treatment he received.
The court reduced the time Navalny must spend in prison to just over 2 1/2 years because of time already served in detention.
The former coordinator of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s team in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has been detained two days before announced rallies to demand the Kremlin critic’s release from prison amid reports his health is rapidly deteriorating.
Denis Mikhailov wrote on Telegram that he was detained early on April 19 for taking part in an unsanctioned demonstration on January 31 protesting Navalny’s arrest.
If found guilty, Mikhailov could face up to 15 days in jail.
The current leader of Navalny’s team in the city, Irina Fatyanova, was sentenced to 10 days in jail on the same charge last week.
Mikhailov’s detainment came a day after Navalny’s supporters announced their plan to hold mass rallies across Russia on April 21 to demand Navalny’s immediate release.
Navalny, 44, was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for a poisoning in Siberia in August with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent. He has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which the Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court in February converted a 3 1/2-year suspended sentence on a charge that Navalny and his supporters call politically motivated to real jail time, saying he broke the terms of the original sentence by leaving Russia for Germany for the life-saving treatment he received.
The court reduced the time Navalny must spend in prison to just over 2 1/2 years because of time already served in detention.
Navalny went on a hunger strike in late March in protest of what he said was the refusal of prison authorities to allow him to receive proper medical care for acute back and leg pain just months after he recovered from the poison attack that nearly took his life.
The health of Putin’s most vocal critic has rapidly deteriorated in recent days and he could suffer cardiac arrest “any minute,” according to his personal doctor and three other physicians, including a cardiologist, who pleaded for access to Navalny in a letter to Russia’s Federal Prison Service.
Top advisers to the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany will hold consultations on April 19 to chart a path for a possible summit aimed at easing tensions in eastern Ukraine.
The talks come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week called on Russia to reverse a troop buildup near the Ukrainian border and in occupied Crimea amid concerns over Moscow’s intentions.
A fragile cease-fire negotiated last summer in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Moscow-backed separatists has also unraveled in recent weeks, leaving at least 30 Ukrainian soldiers killed since the start of the year.
Zelenskiy has said he is seeking four-way talks under the so-called Normandy Format, involving Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany. France and Germany have been mediators in the Ukraine conflict since 2015.
To prepare for a possible summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelenskiy met Macron in Paris on April 16. The two were later joined by Merkel via video link.
The German Chancellery said in a statement after the three-way talks that the sides shared concerns about the Russian troop buildup and “demanded the withdrawal of these reinforcements to reach a deescalation.”
The United States and NATO say the Russian military buildup is the largest since 2014, when Moscow forcibly seized Crimea and backed separatists in the east of Ukraine in a conflict that has killed more than 13,000 people.
The Kremlin denies its military movements are a threat and says they’re a sovereign issue.
Zelenskiy said in Paris that the goal of the political advisers’ meeting is to revive implementation of the so-called Minsk agreements aimed at reaching a durable cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, leading to steps toward a political solution to the conflict.
“The cease-fire initially worked. Now we are waiting for the restoration after the meeting of advisers,” he said of an arrangement reached last summer.
He also said he desired progress on an “all for all” prisoner exchange with separatist forces in the east of the country.
Ukraine’s position is that a cease-fire is a basic precondition for the implementation of the Minsk agreements and would pave the way for the implementation of other difficult provisions of the agreements, such as local elections in the separatist-controlled Donbas and control over the Ukrainian-Russian border.
Failure to advance Normandy Format talks may exacerbate tensions over Ukraine at a time when relations between the West and Russia are already deteriorating over a host of other issues, including the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
A senior Czech official said Russia may have committed “an act of state terrorism” in his country. The Czech government expelled 18 Russian diplomats after intelligence reports linked Moscow to a deadly explosion at an ammunition depot in 2014. Czech police issued wanted notices for two suspected Russian agents. They are the same two men implicated in the attack using a Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, England, in 2018 against Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal. Russia dismissed the allegations as “absurd” and said it would retaliate.
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.”
Bulgarian businessman Emilian Gebrev
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.
Photo Gallery:
A Look Back At The Deadly 2014 Czech Depot Blast That Prague Is Now Blaming On Russian Agents
The Czech Republic ordered 18 Russian diplomats to leave the country after Czech intelligence linked Russian military agents to a massive ammunition depot explosion near Vrbetice on October 20, 2014.
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.
On April 5, a 27-year-old Kyrgyz woman named Aizada Kanatbekova was kidnapped in broad daylight by three men in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek.
The kidnapping was caught on CCTV. Kanatbekova’s family quickly phoned police. And yet almost nothing was done to find her. Two days later, Kanatbekova and her abductor were found dead: she from strangulation and he from suicide, in a car outside of Bishkek.
Days later, a group of women in Bishkek demonstrated against gender violence, only to have their rally broken up by a group of violent men.
A few days earlier, on April 1, the body of 19-year-old Muhlisa Adambaeva was found in Uzbekistan’s western Khorezm Province. She had hanged herself after being beaten by her husband and mistreated by her husband’s family.
Kanatbekova’s attacker had a history of violence that was known to police. And many people knew what Adambaeva had been going through, but local traditions prevented anyone, including her’s immediate family, from intervening.
On this week’s Majlis podcast, RFE/RL media-relations manager Muhammad Tahir moderates a discussion about gender violence in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and why officials in those two countries seem unable to effectively combat it.
This week’s guests are: from Kyrgyzstan, Kamila Eshaliyeva, a Bishkek-based journalist and author of a recent report about violence against women in Kyrgyzstan; from Uzbekistan, Samrin Mamedova of the NeMolchi.uz organization, which works to end violence against women in Uzbekistan; and Bruce Pannier, the author of the Qishloq Ovozi blog.
The Czech Republic ordered 18 Russian diplomats to leave the country after Czech intelligence linked Russian military agents to a massive ammunition depot explosion near Vrbetice on October 20, 2014.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis told reporters late on April 17 that the decision to expel the Russians was made on the basis of “unequivocal evidence” provided by investigators from the Czech intelligence and security services.
The Czech Republic “must react to these unprecedented revelations in a corresponding manner,” Babis said.
Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka has claimed he was the target of a U.S.-backed assassination plot, and Russian intelligence said that two Belarusians detained in Moscow this week were allegedly linked to the plot.
In his announcement on April 17, Lukashenka did not provide evidence to back up his claim. U.S. officials did not immediately respond to the allegations.
Lukashenka, who was ruled Belarus for nearly three decades, has frequently accused Western countries of trying to topple him after he claimed victory in the August presidential election.
The allegations of the assassination plot also come with tensions soaring in neighboring Ukraine, as Russia masses troops along the eastern Ukraine border, and Kyiv warns of possible military intervention.
Russia is Belarus’s closest ally, and Moscow for years has sought to pull Minsk into a tighter union. But Lukashenka has resisted, fearing both a loss of Belarusian independence but also his authority.
Lukashenka said on state TV on April 17 that he and his children were the targets of the alleged assassination plot. He claimed it had been approved by “the top political leadership” of the United States, though he provided no evidence to back up the claim.
Lukashenka also said that Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had brought up the alleged plot in a recent phone call with U.S. President Joe Biden.
Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, said the two Belarusians detained in Moscow this past week by Russian agents were allegedly part of that plot.
The two were identified as Yuras Zyankovich, a Belarusian-born lawyer who also holds U.S. citizenship, and Alyaksandr Fyaduta.
Zyankovich is a former regional leader of the opposition Belarusian Popular Front (BNF) party and once sought to be its presidential candidate. He has been living in the United States since 2007 but recently traveled to the Russian capital.
Zyankovich’s wife, Alena Dzenisavets, told RFE/RL on April 13 that Russian security officers “abducted” her husband from the Nordic Rooms Hotel in Moscow on April 11 and brought him to the Belarusian capital.
Fyaduta, who was Lukashenka’s spokesman when the Belarusian strongman was first elected president in 1994, worked as a media consultant in Moscow.
The Belarusian KGB had announced on April 13 that Fyaduta was in custody in Minsk.
The Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, claimed that the detentions had prevented a military coup in Belarus planned for the May 9 Victory Day parade in Minsk, while Russia’s ONT TV reported that a coup was planned for June or July.
In its announcement on April 17, the FSB also claimed that the alleged plotters were advised in the United States and Poland.
Since the August election, Belarus has been gripped by unprecedented protest and political turmoil, with opposition groups saying it was a stolen election.
Belarusian security forces have arrested tens of thousands of people in a crackdown that has led to accusations of beatings and other rights abuses against demonstrators. The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions against individuals and companies tied to Lukashenka’s regime.
Most prominent opposition leaders — including presidential candidate Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya — have left the country.
Tsikhanouskaya says she was the rightful winner of the vote.
The West has refused to accept Lukashenka’s victory, and few countries aside from Russia acknowledge him as president of Belarus.
Several dozen protesters marched, honked car horns, and rallied in Sarajevo on April 17, calling on the country’s parliament to remove the government, which they accuse of poor management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Organizers of the protest — called “Fight For Life” — accuse the cabinet of being responsible for delays in the procurement of vaccines. Activists also called for mandatory PCR tests upon entry into the country.
Amnesty International has sharply criticized a request by Russian prosecutors to have the Anti-Corruption Foundation of imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny banned as an “extremist” organization.
“Tens of thousands of peaceful activists and the staff of Aleksei Navalny’s organizations are in grave danger,” Natalia Zviagina, head of Amnesty’s Moscow office, said in an April 17 statement. “If their organizations are deemed ‘extremist’ they will all be at imminent risk of criminal prosecution.”
The Amnesty statement also decried Russia’s “long history of abusing ‘anti-extremism’ legislation and said that if the courts grant the prosecutors’ request on labeling Navalny’s organization “extremist,” “the result will likely be one of the most serious blows for the rights to freedom of expression and association in Russia’s post-Soviet history.”
On April 16, the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office asked the Moscow City Court to label as “extremist” three organizations tied to Navalny: the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Citizens’ Rights Protection Foundation, and Navalny’s regional headquarters. Prosecutors said the organizations were “engaged in creating conditions for destabilizing the social and sociopolitical situation under the guise of their liberal slogans.”
Under Russian law, membership in or funding of an “extremist” organization is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The move is the latest in a series of assaults on Navalny since he suffered a nerve-agent poisoning attack in August 2020. He and his supporters blame that attack on Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives acting at the behest of authoritarian President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny spent weeks in Germany recuperating from the attack. When he returned to Russia in January, he was arrested and later sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were trumped up to hinder his political activity.
Navalny has been on a hunger strike in prison since March 31, demanding he be examined by his own doctor amid what his supporters have described as a “deliberate campaign” by prison officials to undermine his health.
On April 17, the French daily Le Monde and other leading European newspapers published an open letter signed by more than 70 actors, writers, directors, and other cultural figures demanding that Navalny be provided adequate medical treatment.
“As a Russian citizen, he is entitled to an examination and treatment by a doctor of his choice,” read the letter, which was signed by Nobel Prize laureates Herta Mueller, Louise Gluck, Orhan Pamuk, and Svetlana Alexievich, among others.
The pieces for a major surge of fighting in the Donbas continue to fall into place, highlighting an escalation of tensions between Russia and Ukraine that could potentially play out on the battlefield.
Analysts are loath to predict what will happen as Russia continues a massive military buildup near Ukraine’s borders and in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Russian forces in 2014.
But while the more optimistic view is that the show of force is a bluff intended to test the West’s resolve in supporting Kyiv in the face of Moscow’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, the moves heighten the risks that fighting that has been contained to the Donbas since 2014 could spill over into a broader conflict.
“If it’s just a ‘show of strength,’ Russia is doing an awful lot to make it wholly convincing,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), wrote on Twitter on April 14.
Rising Numbers
In recent weeks, Russia has unexpectedly boosted its troop presence near the conflict zone in Ukraine. As questions about Moscow’s motives mounted, military officials eventually said the forces were moved for exercises intended to test combat readiness in response to long-planned NATO drills in Europe.
Thousands of Russian troops have been transferred to a staging area south of Voronezh, located about 250 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, adding to forces already stationed there.
Analysis of open-source material by the global intelligence company Janes has identified tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, long-range artillery, rocket launchers, and Iskander short-range ballistic missile systems among the materiel that has been moved to the area since mid-March. U.S. and NATO officials have called it the largest military buildup in the region since Russia’s surprise occupation of Crimea and the start of fighting in the Donbas, which has killed more than 13,000 combatants and civilians since April 2014.
Janes, which specializes in military and defense analysis, has also identified army air-defense systems being transported to the region as well as a long-range telecommunications system and a field hospital.
Similar activity has been seen in the Rostov region, which borders parts of the Donbas held by Russia-backed separatists, and on the Tavrida highway to Crimea, with eyewitnesses telling RFE/RL that convoys includes combat vehicles and multiple-rocket launching systems.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Taran told the European Parliament this week that Russia would ultimately have 110,000 troops within 56 tactical battalions at its disposal in Crimea and near Ukraine’s borders, saying the built-up force could be used for “unpredictable, escalatory actions.”
The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, announced it was sending additional naval vessels to reinforce the Crimea-based Black Sea Fleet. Without evidence, Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning an offensive against separatist forces in the Donbas and has warned that it would intervene if necessary to protect Russian citizens — an apparent reference to residents of the separatist-held areas who have been given Russian passports.
This all comes as a cease-fire brokered last summer has collapsed in the Donbas, with more than 25 Ukrainian soldiers killed in separatist-held areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since the start of the year, compared to 50 in all of 2020, and separatist forces claiming that more than 20 of their fighters have been killed.
Exit Residents, Enter Russian Journalists
Heorhiy Tuka, a former Ukrainian deputy minister for what Kyiv calls the temporarily occupied territories, says that families in separatist-held areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are leaving for Russia in anticipation of a big war.
While Tuka told Current Time on April 14 that it was too early to say what might happen, he boiled things down to three likely scenarios:
A show of force intended to force a new round of negotiations regarding the conflict in the Donbas;
An escalation of fighting involving pinpoint strikes that would not result in Russian forces crossing its border with Ukraine and would force negotiations;
Or a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that would attempt to establish a corridor between Russian-controlled Crimea and separatist-held territories in the Donbas.
Tuka said he considered the second scenario to be the most likely, with the ultimate goal being the mandatory resumption of fresh water supplies to Crimea and direct negotiations between Kyiv and the two Russia-backed, self-declared governments in separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine, demands that Moscow has been making since the war began in 2014.
We are inferior to the Russian Army in weapons and military equipment. On the other hand, the Ukrainian Army surpasses the enemy in motivation.”
At the same time, journalist Denys Kazanskiy, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the trilateral contact group on the Donbas — which comprises Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE — said that Russian pro-government media were entering the conflict zone.
Kazanskiy described this as an “alarming” sign, saying that “when such people appear, their arrival is usually marked with some kind of aggravation” that is blamed on Ukraine.
Despite the Russian military buildup and being told that Ukraine is preparing to invade, Kazanskiy said, he said he does not believe the people in the separatist-held areas are panicking, because they have seen this before.
“It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” Kazanskiy said, noting that residents were told recently that the invasion would take place on March 15. “They shout all the time that Ukraine will attack, and advance, and that aggravates tensions.”
No Comparison
Should major hostilities break out again in the Donbas, the situation will have changed a lot since 2014, according to experts. Both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are seen as better prepared.
Kyiv has significantly boosted defense spending since 2014, has U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles in its arsenal, and boasts troop numbers of nearly 250,000 compared to 168,000 in 2013.
A Ukrainian soldier patrols near the front line with Russia-backed separatists near the city of Marinka in the eastern Donetsk region on April 12.
When fighting broke out in eastern Ukraine, the country estimated that it had only 5,000 combat-ready troops and had to call on volunteer militias to help in the war effort, and Russian forces no longer benefit from the element of surprise.
As for Russia, “the situation is fundamentally different,” according to military expert Yuriy Butusov, editor in chief of the Ukrainian website Censor.net.
“A military reform has been taking place in Russia since 2015,” Butusov told RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “It is aimed at strengthening the quality component of the armed forces, specifically for the conditions of a local war, military operations against Ukraine.”
Soldiers carry the coffin of Ihor Baitala, a service member of the Ukrainian armed forces who was killed at the beginning of April in the fighting against Russia-backed separatists in the country’s east, during a farewell ceremony in Lviv on April 10. More than 25 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far this year.
Rather than maintaining understaffed units, he said, “the Russian Army has moved on to maintaining a large number of full-fledged, ready-for-immediate-action units that are in a higher degree of combat readiness.”
Ultimately, however, Butusov said that the lack of structural reforms in the Ukrainian military would make it difficult for it in a mobile war with Russia.
“We are inferior to the Russian Army in weapons and military equipment,” he said. “On the other hand, the Ukrainian Army surpasses the enemy in motivation.”
Former Ukrainian deputy minister Tuka gave a similarly dour assessment of Ukraine’s chances in a war with Russia, saying, among other things, that Ukraine’s air-defense system is in “a deplorable state.”
“You have to speak objectively and honestly,” he told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. “The fact is that if assets of the Russian armed forces are used — such as aviation, missile forces, or long-range artillery — then I have grave doubts .”
Another factor in the tension over the Russian military buildup is Moscow’s severely strained relations with the West.
The announcement of new U.S. sanctions on Russia on April 15 may make the Kremlin more cautious about actions that would further aggravate those ties, Aleksandr Baunov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Twitter.
“But for now, Russia will make no notable overtures of peace,” he wrote. “Accordingly, the escalation over the Donbas may continue.”
Written by Michael Scollon with reporting by Current Time correspondent Vladimir Mikhailov and Mark Krutov of RFE/RL’s Russian Service
Russia’s reported plans to restrict maritime traffic in parts of the Black Sea for six months as it holds military maneuvers would be “unjustified” and “destabilizing,” NATO said on April 16, demanding Moscow allow Ukraine freedom of navigation.
The move to block traffic in the Black Sea was also swiftly condemned by Ukraine and the European Union. Tensions between Russia and Ukraine are elevated as Moscow masses troops near Ukraine’s border and on the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.
“Russia’s ongoing militarization of Crimea, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Azov are further threats to Ukraine’s independence, and undermine the stability of the broader region,” a spokeswoman for NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. “We call on Russia to de-escalate immediately, stop its pattern of provocations, and respect its international commitments.”
Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency, citing a Defense Ministry statement, reported that Moscow plans to close parts of the Black Sea to foreign military ships and other state vessels from April 24 until October 31 to conducted navy drills.
The restrictions would apply to the western tip of the Crimean Peninsula, its southern coastline from Sevastopol to Hurzuf, and a “rectangle” off the Kerch Peninsula near the Opuksky Nature Reserve.
Restrictions
Such restrictions could prevent access to Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov, which is connected to the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait.
“We are concerned by reports that Russia plans to restrict access to parts of the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait. This would be an unjustified move, and part of a broader pattern of destabilizing behavior by Russia,” the NATO statement said. “We call on Russia to ensure free access to Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov, and allow freedom of navigation.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry blasted the restrictions as a “usurpation of the sovereign rights of Ukraine.”
It also stressed that under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, “Russia must neither obstruct or halt transit through the international strait to ports in the Sea of Azov.”
The European Union called the Russian provocation “highly worrying” and echoed NATO’s call for Moscow to allow the free passage of ships.
“The intention by the Russian Federation to close certain areas of the Black Sea for navigation until October 2021 under the pretext of military exercises is highly worrying,” said the office of the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell.
“The European Union expects Russia to ensure unhindered and free passage to and from the Sea of Azov in accordance with international law,” Borrell’s spokesman, Peter Stano, said in a statement.
The Kerch Strait became a scene of confrontation in 2018 after Russia seized three Ukrainian ships there over alleged violations of its territorial waters.
The Kerch Strait is also the site of a much-hyped 19-kilometer bridge connecting Crimea with mainland Russia that Moscow opened in 2018.
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.
The Russian government is dependent on ruble-denominated debt.
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.
BISHKEK — The U.S. Embassy in Kyrgyzstan has expressed concern over the release from pretrial detention of Raimbek Matraimov, the controversial former deputy chief of the Kyrgyz Customs Service who was placed on the U.S. Magnitsky sanctions list for his involvement in the illegal funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars abroad.
In a statement on April 16, the embassy said it felt “disappointment at the release of organized crime boss” Matraimov.
“We would note that Matraimov is the subject of U.S. State Department and Treasury Department Global Magnitsky and visa sanctions for his participation in a corrupt customs scheme in which at least $700 million was laundered from the Kyrgyz Republic, funds which could have been used by the Kyrgyz government for priorities such as health care, education, agriculture, and pensions. The United States remains committed to freezing his criminal assets overseas and returning them to the Kyrgyz people,” the embassy statement said.
The statement came a day after Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security (UKMK) said a probe against Matraimov was stopped after investigators failed to find cash or real estate belonging to Matraimov or members of his family abroad.
When Matraimov was rearrested in February, the UKMK said he was suspected of laundering money through the purchase of property in China, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.
The U.S. Embassy’s April 16 statement stressed that Washington continues to cooperate with Bishkek to combat organized crime and corruption.
“In relation to Matraimov, we are working together with Kyrgyz law enforcement to identify properties and financial interests owned by Matraimov that could be frozen under the requirements of the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. The 2019 return by the United States of $4.5 million of [fugitive former President Kurmanbek Bakiev’s son] Maksim Bakiev’s corrupt money is evidence of U.S. commitment to fight corruption and return stolen assets to the Kyrgyz people,” the statement said.
A Bishkek court in February ordered pretrial custody for Matraimov in connection with the corruption charges after hundreds of Kyrgyz protested a ruling mitigating his sentence after he plead guilty to offenses. People were upset that the mitigated sentence meant no jail time for Matraimov and fines of just a few thousand dollars.
The court had justified the move saying that Matraimov had paid back around $24 million that disappeared through corruption schemes that he oversaw.
That decision was based on an economic-amnesty law passed in December 2020 that allows individuals who obtained financial assets through illegal means to avoid prosecution by turning the assets over to the State Treasury.
The idea of economic amnesty was announced in October 2020 by Sadyr Japarov, then acting Kyrgyz president, just a day after Matraimov was detained and placed under house arrest. Japarov has since been elected as president on a pledge to stamp out graft and enact reforms. Japarov also championed a new constitution — approved by voters earlier this month — that expands the power of the president.
Critics say the amnesty legislation was proposed and hastily prepared by lawmakers to allow Matraimov and others to avoid a conviction for corruption, while the constitutional changes create an authoritarian system and concentrate too much power in the hands of the president.
In June 2019, an investigation by RFE/RL, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and Kloop implicated Matraimov in a corruption scheme involving the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars out of Kyrgyzstan by Chinese-born Uyghur businessman Aierken Saimaiti, who was subsequently assassinated in Istanbul in November 2019.
In a section on respect for civil liberties, including freedom of the press, the State Department noted threats to journalists involved in that report, which implicated Matraimov.
In January, the 49-year-old Matraimov changed his last name to Ismailov, while his wife, Uulkan Turgunova, changed her family name to Sulaimanova. The moves, confirmed to RFE/RL by a spokesperson for Kyrgyzstan’s state registration service, were seen as an attempt to evade the U.S.- imposed sanctions.
There have been no official statements from lawyers for Matraimov’s family to explain the name change.
MINSK — Belarusian lawmakers have approved a second reading of several amendments to legislation severely restricting civil rights and the free flow of information amid a crackdown on the country’s pro-democracy movement.
The bills approved by members of the lower house on April 16 define a broad range of activities as “extremist,” providing additional ammunition for authorities to use draconian tactics to target and intimidate protesters and opposition forces challenging the official results of a presidential election last year that handed authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka his sixth consecutive term.
In the wake of the election, thousands of Belarusians have taken to the streets in what has become the largest and most-persistent show of opposition to Lukashenka. More than 33,000 people have been arrested in a crackdown that has left much of the opposition leadership in exile or prison. The European Union, the United States, and other nations have refused to recognize the declared election results and slapped sanctions on Lukashenka and other senior Belarusian officials.
The new amendments are likely to spark an outcry for further action.
According to the amendments, any activities by individuals, political parties, or domestic or international organizations defined as undermining independence, sovereignty, the constitutional order, and public safety will be considered as “extremist.”
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
If approved and signed into law, the amendments would ban lawyers from defending people in some criminal and administrative cases. Most of the lawyers who worked with the Belarusian Association of Journalists and have defended RFE/RL reporters in recent months have already been stripped of their licenses.
The proposed changes also say that the following actions will be considered as extremist activities: the distribution of false information; insulting an official; discrediting the state; impeding activities of the Central Election Commission and other state organs; and participating in or organizing unauthorized mass protests.
One passage of the amendments says that any materials promoting unsanctioned public events that can be read, sung, or shown will be considered as “extremist symbols.” That includes portraits of anyone who was legally found to be an extremist.
In other parts, amendments to the law on media will allow authorities to shut down media outlets after they receive warnings if their activities pose a “threat to the country’s national security.”
The amendments also expand the ability of authorities to limit access to online publications if they carry information banned for distribution and refuse to follow requests by officials to address violations.
Lawmakers also approved in a second reading of amendments to the Criminal Code. Among other things, the changes would toughen punishment for disobeying, threatening, and assaulting law enforcement.
Another amendment would prohibit live coverage of unsanctioned protests, making journalists a target for attending such events.
Amendments to other existing laws dealing with extremism would give law enforcement officers the right to use firearms at their own discretion without waiting for a command from supervisors. Police would also be given the right to create lists of individuals they feel are inclined to participate in extremist activities.
Once on such a list, a person would be banned from some activities, including journalism, publishing, and teaching, while their financial activities would be put under surveillance. The amendments allow the central bank to monitor cash withdrawals through foreign-issued debit cards and limit such withdrawals, as well as to freeze the bank accounts of “suspicious individuals.”
MOSCOW — The team of imprisoned Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny has published details of what it alleges is a lavish residence belonging to President Vladimir Putin and kept from public view, the latest salvo in the opposition’s push to boost expected turnout for planned protests and maintain pressure on the Kremlin ahead of parliamentary elections expected this fall.
The video investigation, which had attracted 2.7 million views on YouTube within the first 20 hours of its publication on April 15, alleges that Putin’s fourth official residence, on 150 hectares of land located near Lake Valdai northwest of Moscow, contains sumptuous interiors and includes a large spa center not revealed to Russian taxpayers.
“Why on earth are we financing the construction of Putin’s private spa-complexes?” Navalny aide Maria Pevchikh asks in the video. “Why on earth are billions of rubles of taxpayer money going to one person’s decompression, mud-therapy and antiaging procedures?”
Investigations released by Navalny and his team over the past year have been viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube. The new probe comes just weeks after separate videos shed light on a $1.35 billion Black Sea palace allegedly built for Putin and the circumstances around Navalny’s poisoning in Siberia last August, which the anti-corruption crusader blames on Putin and the Federal Security Service.
Citing property records, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) says part of the land is formally registered to a company called Praym LLC, which, according to the FBK, is owned by billionaire banker Yury Kovalchuk, the main shareholder of Bank Rossiya and one of Putin’s oldest friends.
FBK says that there are about 80 buildings on the land leased from Praym, including a four-story, 3,500-square-meter mansion, a Chinese-style pavilion, a Russian-style izba (wooden cabin), baths, saunas, a stable, a golf course, and a VIP restaurant that includes a cinema, bowling, billiards, and a small casino. The property also has its own church. Near the main building is an even larger one containing a spa complex with two underground floors and a total area of nearly 7,000 square meters (almost 75,350 square feet), according to FBK.
Navalny, Putin’s most-vocal critic, was sentenced in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were fabricated to sideline and discredit him. He was arrested in January after returning from Germany, where he was treated for the poison attack that European laboratories said involved a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.
WATCH: Pole Dancing And Fancy Toilet Brushes: Millions Watch Navalny Video On Alleged ‘Putin Palace’
The new video also comes amid a push by Navalny’s aides, who have pledged to continue opposition activism, to boost expected turnout at fresh protests slated to take place in coming weeks. Anti-government rallies across Russia in January elicited a violent law enforcement crackdown and a concerted legal campaign against Navalny’s supporters throughout the country, which continues to reverberate with new raids and arrests almost three months after the demonstrations ended.
Citing the violence deployed by police, and the clear dangers faced by protesters, Navalny’s aides in early February called for a cessation of street demonstrations in favor of a redoubled focus on compiling evidence of state corruption ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for September, which will occur against the backdrop of falling ratings for ruling party United Russia. The decision, which came as hundreds of protesters languished in squalid jails awaiting trial, prompted indignation from some Navalny supporters.
On March 23, Navalny’s aides placated some of the disillusioned supporters with a new initiative aimed at gauging protest potential. They launched a website on which Russians could register anonymously to take part in the next protest wave in support of Navalny, marking their location on an interactive map. Once the number of registered participants reaches 500,000, the team said, they will set a date for fresh protests.
Pevchikh and Georgi Alburov, her co-host in the latest video, ended the clip by urging viewers to sign up on the protest website.
But the same day the video was released, as the online protest tally reached 430,000, Navalny’s team was forced to apologize after reports emerged that thousands of e-mail addresses belonging to registered participants had been leaked online, apparently by hackers who then messaged the participants dismissing Navalny’s team as “losers.”
Calling the leak “a retaliatory blow” in response to the latest video, Navalny aide Ivan Zhdanov said the leak contained only e-mail addresses, adding that their owners faced few consequences beyond receiving unsolicited messages discrediting Navalny and the broader opposition movement.
“We apologize for any nuisance caused,” Zhdanov wrote in a public message on the messenger Telegram. “We’ll do everything to make sure this never happens again.”
DUSHANBE — The wife of a suspected terrorist in Tajikistan, whose confession was shown on television nationwide, says her husband’s admission of guilt was coerced by investigators.
Imomali Idibegov’s televised statement, where he admitted to having links with terrorists, was broadcast on April 14.
During the program where the statement was made, Idibegov’s wife, Dilbar Ghanieva, confirms that her husband was detained on April 6 on terrorism charges.
But on April 15, Ghanieva told RFE/RL that police had forced them to confess to something her 38-year-old spouse had not done.
“The police interrogated us and insulted us with very vulgar words for a week. In the end, my husband could not stand it and said: ‘Let my wife go, I will confess to anything you want,’” she told RFE/RL.
“I know for sure that my husband is not a terrorist. They also forced me…to say on television that my husband is a terrorist,” Ghanieva said.
Though there was no immediate evidence to back up Ghanieva’s claims, domestic and international human rights groups have said that police in Tajikistan often use illegal methods to coerce people suspected in different crimes, including terrorism, as well as individuals persecuted for their political views or rights activities to confess.
The Interior Ministry has said Idibegov has expressed support for the Islamic State and other terrorist groups via the Internet and distributed materials propagating terrorism while working in Russia as a migrant worker in 2015-2017.
According to the ministry, Idibegov is also wanted in Russia, where he, along with two Uzbek nationals, is suspected of planning a series of terrorist attacks and financially supporting the Islamic State terrorist group.
In all, 29 Tajik citizens are wanted in Russia on terrorism-related charges.
Authorities in Tajikistan have said that about 2,000 citizens of the country joined the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, of whom more than 500 were killed.
NOVI SAD, Serbia — A Serbian broadcast journalist is in the hospital after being beaten by unidentified assailants in the northern city of Novi Sad, the latest in a string of attacks against media workers in the Balkan country.
Dasko Milinovic said in a tweet that he was tear-gassed and beaten with metal bars early on April 16 by two hooded men who then fled the scene.
The attack was condemned by Prime Ministe Ana Brnabic, who called it a “terrible and inadmissible” occurrence and vowed that the attackers will be “severely punished.”
Serbia, which is formally seeking European Union membership, is under growing pressure from the bloc to improve press freedoms and safety for reporters, especially for those investigating crime and corruption.
Local police told RFE/RL that they were investigating the incident in which Milinovic suffered “minor injuries,” according to a medical report quoted by the police.
Milinovic and his colleague, Mladen Urdarevic, host a daily satirical show called Alarm on their Internet radio station.
Following the attack, Milinovic wrote on Twitter that his state was good and blamed the attack on what he called “fascists.”
“I’m fine. Fascists are stupid as hell. I was tear-gassed and hit in the arm three times. Thanks for caring. Death to fascism!” Milinovic wrote.
The Independent Association of Journalists of Vojvodina (NDNV) called for the perpetrators of the attack to be brought to justice.
“This is another incident in a very short period of time in which journalists were directly attacked,” the NDVD said.
“Barbaric attacks show how seriously endangered the physical security of journalists and media workers in Serbia is today,” NDVD said, adding that such attacks were “a direct consequence of the inaction of state institutions, which do not solve attacks on journalists.”
Brnabic, speaking to journalists in Belgrade on April 16, said that the attack represented “a red line, which must not be crossed in a civilized society.”
In its latest report on Serbia, the EU said that “cases of threats, intimidation, and violence against journalists are still a source of serious concern.”
In February, a Serbian court sentenced Dragoljub Simonovic, the former mayor of a Belgrade suburb, to more than four years in prison for being behind a 2018 arson attack on the home of investigative reporter Milan Iovanovic.
President Aleksandar Vucic, who has been Serbia’s president since 2017, has faced accusations of curbing media freedoms and democracy.
MOSCOW — Two of four editors of the student magazine Doxa have appealed a Moscow court’s decision to place then in de facto house arrest on a charge of “engaging minors in actions that might be dangerous” over a video related to unsanctioned rallies to protest the incarceration of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.
Pavel Chikov of the human rights group Agora quoted lawyers for editors Armen Aramyan and Vladimir Metyolkin as saying on April 16 that they filed an appeal against the court’s order for the two journalists and their colleagues, Alla Gutnikova and Natalya Tyshkevich, to remain in their homes from midnight until 11:59 p.m. for two months, giving them only one minute to be outside each day.
It was not clear whether Gutnikova and Tyshkevich planned to appeal the ruling as well.
The four were detained for questioning at the Investigative Committee after their homes and the magazine’s offices were searched over the video, which the magazine posted online in January.
The video questioned teachers’ moves to warn students about possible repercussions they could face for participating in unsanctioned rallies on January 23 and 31 in protest of Navalny’s arrest.
Doxa editors say the video was deleted from the magazine’s website following a demand from Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove it.
More than 10,000 supporters of Navalny were detained across Russia during and after the January rallies.
Many of the detained men and women were either fined or handed several-day jail terms. At least 90 were charged with criminal offenses and several have been fired by their employers.
Human rights groups have called on Moscow repeatedly to stop targeting journalists because they are covering the protests or express solidarity with protesters, since both are protected under the right to freedom of expression.
“Instead of targeting journalists, the authorities should hold accountable police who attack journalists and interfere with their work,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement on February 3.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on January 17 upon his arrival from Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning in Siberia in August 2020 that several European laboratories concluded was a military-grade chemical nerve agent.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning was ordered directly by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from that case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given the amount of time he had been held in detention.
Iranian officials say the country has begun enriching uranium up to 60 percent purity, higher than it has ever done before, despite ongoing talks between Tehran and world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.
State television quoted parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf as saying that Iranian scientists had successfully started enriching 60 percent uranium after midnight local time on April 16.
His comments were backed up by Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization, who was quoted by the semiofficial Tasnim news agency as saying that “the enrichment of uranium to 60 percent is under way” at the Natanz nuclear site.
The move raises the stakes as Iran negotiates with world powers in Vienna over a way to bring Washington and Tehran into full compliance with the 2015 agreement, abandoned by the United States under former President Donald Trump three years ago.
Iran announced on April 13 that it planned to start enriching uranium at up to 60 percent purity in reaction to an alleged attack on the Natanz nuclear site two days before that they have blamed on archenemy Israel.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog has confirmed that Iran was preparing to enrich uranium to 60 percent purity at an aboveground facility at the site.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran had committed to keep enrichment to 3.67 percent. Recently it has been enriching up to 20 percent, saying the deal was no longer enforceable.
While enriching uranium to 60 percent would be the highest level achieved by Iran’s nuclear program, it is still short of the 90 percent purity needed for military use. Tehran has repeatedly denied it is seeking nuclear weapons and that its nuclear ambitions are purely for civilian purposes.
Iran and other parties to the accord — Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia — last week launched what has been described as “constructive” talks aimed at reviving the nuclear agreement, with European countries working as intermediaries between Washington and Tehran.
After more talks in Vienna on April 15, diplomats said two working groups would continue discussions and refine details on how to lift U.S. sanctions and bring Iran back into compliance with restrictions on its nuclear program.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said late on April 14 that Tehran’s “provocative” announcement on enrichment “calls into question Iran’s seriousness with regard the nuclear talks.”
Britain, France, and Germany have expressed “grave concern” over Tehran’s “dangerous” announcement, saying it was “contrary to the constructive spirit and good faith” of ongoing efforts to revive the 2015 pact.
Few details have emerged about the alleged April 11 sabotage, which Iranian officials said knocked out power at the enrichment plant in central Iran.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement but multiple Israeli media outlets quoted unnamed intelligence sources as saying that the country’s Mossad spy service carried out a successful sabotage operation at the Natanz site.
Lawmaker Alireza Zakani, who heads the research center of Iran’s parliament, said in an interview that “several thousand centrifuges were damaged and destroyed.” Other officials said that only first-generation machines had been affected.
Citing two intelligence sources, The New York Times has reported that production at Natanz could be set back by at least nine months due to the attack.
