Moscow fired back at European leaders on Tuesday after it was accused of involvement in a 2014 explosion at an ammunition depot in the Czech Republic, accusing the west of harboring “mass anti-Russian hysteria.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the remark, according to Reuters, while denying that Moscow was responsible for raising tensions with the west even as tens of thousands of Russian troops are amassed near the border with Ukraine.
His remarks came in apparent response to accusations from the Czech Republic surrounding the explosion in Vrbetice that killed two people. Czech police released photographs of suspects who strongly resemble two suspects previously accused of involvement in the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in the U.K.
“It has been announced by the Czech authorities that the two GRU Officers that were charged with the attempted murder of the Skripals in Salisbury, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, were also behind the deaths of two civilians and an explosion in the Czech town of Vrbetice,” said the U.K.’s foreign office in a statement obtained by CNN.
In response to the findings, Czech officials moved to expel more than a dozen Russian diplomats from the country, a move that was met with reciprocal expulsions of Czech diplomats from Moscow.
Russia’s foreign ministry ripped the Czech government’s expulsions as “based on unfounded and far-fetched excuses,” and accused Prague of trying to please the U.S.
This was “an effort to please the United States against the background of recent US sanctions against Russia, the Czech authorities have even surpassed their overseas masters in this regard,” a Russian foreign ministry statement said on Sunday.