DISINFO: Ordinary Czech citizen criticises Czech media and policy
SUMMARY
No credible information comes through the Czech media, not even the state ones. There is only hysteria. "The Russians are coming, everything is bad, we are screwed." The average people, I would say, either do not hear this, because this is some kind of noise, or they are simply already laughing, because as soon as you show Petrov and Boshirov, what kind of a couple are they? These are two characters who are constantly doing something somewhere and cannot do anything.
Meanwhile, Miloš [Miloš Flajšhans] himself is not laughing. More than a hundred Czech companies, including the one in which he works himself, have a representative office in Russia. Everyone has their own business.
RESPONSE
A case of impersonation. Pro-Kremlin media Rossiya-24 gives the floor to the "ordinary Czech citizen" living in Russia, Miloš Flajšhans. Mr Flajšhans questions the quality of the Czech media and and declares that "everyone is laughing" at the version about "Petrov and Boshirov."
Miloš Flajšhans, who pretends to be a Moscow based employee of an unnamed Czech company, was a correspondent for the Russian state news agency Rossiya Segodnya. As a "columnist for the Rossiya Segodnya, based in Prague", he participated in the Livadia-2019 forum, which was held in St. Petersburg, and in Livadia-2020 forum in Minsk. He is also listed as editor of Rossiya Segodnya in an interview published on the Slovak site ExtraPlus in March 2021. On the website of the Russian magazine "Ideas and Innovations", he is referred to as "a Czech journalist working in Russia".
The investigation by Czech authorities established beyond doubt that GRU agents Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the same individuals considered responsible for the attempted murder of Sergey Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, were behind the explosion in an ammunition storage depot in the Czech location of Vrbetice in 2014, which killed two people. According to investigators, an email supposedly from the National Guard of Tajikistan had requested permission for two individuals - ”Ruslan Tabarov” from Tajikistan and “Nicolaj Popa” from Moldova - to visit the storage site and included the scanned image of two false passports with the pictures of both men. The images of “Tabarov” and “Popa” matched those of Chepiga and Mishkin.
The report is part of a disinformation campaign about the events surrounding the Vrbetice explosion in 2014 and the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic in April 2021, aiming at ridiculing the official investigation which discovered the involvment of GRU agents.