Has Russia been accused by the Czech authorities, without any evidence, of being responsible for blowing up two ammunition depots in the Czech village of Vrbetice in 2014, killing two people? No, that's not true: After ten years of investigation, prosecutors stated that the number of pieces of evidence and their detailed evaluation sufficiently substantiate the conclusion that two Russian GRU agents - to the military intelligence service - destroyed the depots on behalf of the Russian Federation.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on April 30, 2024. The caption overlay on the video reads in Czech, translated by Lead Stories staff as:
As always, we have no evidence, but it's Russia's fault.
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon May 15 08:34:20 2024 UTC)
The video uses a screenshot of an article from the Czech news website Seznam Zpravy published on April 30, 2024 (archived here), which points out that although the police have published the results of their investigation into the Vrbetice case, which clearly attribute the 2014 explosions in Vrbetice to Russian military intelligence - specifically agents Anatoly Chepig and Alexander Mishkin - former Czech President Milos Zeman still has doubts about their involvement. Despite condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Zeman had previously expressed pro-Russian views and has also been the only prominent Czech politician who, in 2021, doubted the secret intelligence services (archived here) findings that linked the two Russian military agents Chepig (archived here) and Mishkin (archived here), also to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018.
The prosecutor´s office, the police, and intelligence services all officially concluded that the two Russian agents were involved in the blasts of the ammunition depots housed in the Czech Republic after a ten-year investigation was concluded in 2024. Already in 2021, the government of the time had acted on information received from the intelligence services.
In 2014, two blasts occurred in a privately owned ammunition depot in Vrbetice, a village in the southeastern part of the Czech Republic, killing two local Czech employees. On April 17, 2021, Andrej Babis, who was then the Prime Minister, announced in a special press conference (archived here) that the government had received "unequivocal" evidence that Russian military intelligence officers were involved in the explosions, and announced that 18 Russian diplomats working at the embassy in Prague would be expelled. On the same day, the police also said they were looking for two people whose photos corresponded to those of the Russian agents (archived here) involved in the Skripal´s case, who stayed in the Czech Republic in 2014 under different aliases and asked for help in identifying their movements in the country.
The incident was condemned by international representatives, with some calling it "state-sponsored terrorism" (archived here), and the Czech Republic received NATO´s solidarity (archived here) for its decision to expel Russian diplomats, with some states following its step (archived here).
On April 29, 2024, the Czech police said that the two suspects were in Russia and that since Russia had refused to comply with requests by the Czech Republic to provide necessary information held by the Russian military and intelligence services, the prosecution could not begin, and that the authorities had to postpone the case (archived here). Nevertheless, the press release states that "The police authority considers it proven that the explosions that it considered proven that the explosions (...) were carried out by agents of the Russian military intelligence" - or GRU - to prevent the delivery of weapons to areas where Russia conducts military operations.
The Regional Public Prosecutor Office in Brno, also issued a statement on April 29, 2024, with details of the case, reiterating that the police´s conclusion about GRU agents committing the blasts is "sufficiently substantiated" (archived here) but that the case against them had to be postponed.
On April 29, 2024, the Czech Intelligence Service (BIS) announced that the police conclusions had confirmed information previously gathered by the services (archived here) in 2021. The BIS findings, which led to a major rift in Czech-Russian relations that year, had previously been questioned by former Czech President Zeman, who also claimed several times that the services were "not professional enough" (archived here). His claims are beyond the scope of this fact-check.
