Eighteen Russian embassy staff, 48 hours to leave. That was the Czech government’s order on April 17, 2021, and it set the tone for a run of European spy cases over the next two years.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis said there was “well-grounded suspicion” that officers of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, had been involved in an explosion at the Vrbetice ammunition depot. The blasts hit on October 16, 2014, 330 kilometers southeast of Prague, and killed two employees of a private firm that rented the site from a state military organization. Foreign Minister Jan Hamacek said the 18 diplomats had been identified as intelligence personnel. Czech police also began looking for two men travelling on passports in the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the aliases of the Russian officers British prosecutors charged over the 2018 Skripal poisoning. Both the suspects and Moscow denied any part in it.
Moscow summoned the Czech ambassador. France 24 described the row as the sharpest between Prague and Moscow since 1989.
March 2022: four capitals act together
A year later, with the war in Ukraine weeks old, the Netherlands removed 17 Russian diplomats. Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said the people concerned, though accredited as diplomats, were “secretly active as intelligence officers.” He gave the reason as “the greatly changed context, with the war in Ukraine and the increasing Russian assertiveness.”
The Dutch had 75 Russian diplomats on their books; 58 would stay. The expelled had two weeks to go.
Belgium sent home 21, Ireland told four senior officials to leave, and the Czech Republic expelled one more, with 72 hours’ notice, RFE/RL reported. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova answered that “Countermeasures will be taken.”
Norway, October 2022: a researcher who was not Brazilian
The Norwegian case came with a cover story. Norway’s counter-intelligence service, the PST, arrested a man who had been living as a 37-year-old Brazilian researcher named Jose Assis Giammaria at the University of Tromso. The PST said he was Mikhail Mikushin, “a Russian born in 1978.”
Police first held him on immigration violations as he travelled to work on a Monday morning, then widened the case to espionage. An Oslo court remanded him for four weeks, the first two in complete isolation. Authorities said his interest was “Norway’s Arctic policy and ‘hybrid’ threats,” in a country that shares a 198-kilometre border with Russia in the north.
Christo Grozev of Bellingcat was blunt: “Great job, Norway, you’ve caught yourself a colonel from the GRU.” Mikushin denied everything. The Russian embassy in Oslo said “spy mania has been actively promoted in Norway lately.” SBS News added that Norway had arrested nine other Russian nationals in recent weeks over drone violations and photographs of restricted sites.
Sources
- Czech Republic expels 18 Russian diplomats, seeks Skripal suspects over 2014 explosion (France 24)
- Four European Countries Expel Dozens Of Russian Diplomats For Alleged Spying (RFE/RL)
- A suspected Russian spy posed as a Brazilian researcher in Norway (SBS News)
