Belarus has expelled a Czech diplomat, responding to a similar measure taken by the Czech Republic earlier this month against a Belarusian diplomat alleged to be spying for the Belarusian KGB.
The Security Information Service (BIS) of the Czech Republic revealed in a press release a few weeks earlier that a Belarusian diplomat had been designated as a persona non grata and given 72 hours to leave the country for passing intelligence to the Belarusian KGB. The individual (not officially named by the authorities) was allegedly part of a network of KGB spies that had been operating in several EU countries.
The intelligence services of Romania, Hungary, and Czech Republic collaborated to reveal a network including notable figures such as the former deputy head of Moldovan intelligence Alexandru Bălan. Within the same week, Polish authorities also arrested an agent and expelled a diplomat for espionage. These efforts were supported by Eurojust, an agency that oversees judicial cooperation among EU member states on criminal matters.
The Belarusian Foreign Ministry in Minsk fired back at the Czech Republic, calling the expulsion baseless and politically motivated, and asserting that it was damaging to goodwill between the nations, already fragile following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Belarus’s decision to allow Russia to use their territory to carry out their operations was condemned by the Czech Republic.
Some sources including the Belarusian news agency Radyo Svaboda and the Warsaw based thinktank iSANS, claim to have identified the diplomat as Mikalai Dukshta, who held the position of counsellor for administrative affairs at the Belarusian embassy in Prague. However BIS have refrained from providing any further information about the individual in question, citing potential harm to the ongoing investigation as justification for discretion.
The latest development is the expulsion of a Czech diplomat from Belarus, in a tit-for-tat move by Belarusian authorities, who stated it was “the result of years of cultivated bias against Belarus by the Czech authorities.” Belarus also summoned a Polish diplomat for a meeting following their actions.
The expulsions signal a further step in the longer-term deterioration of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
