Russia puts the Czech Republic on an official enemies list

UNLIKE TEENAGERSEUNATO, countries rarely write down lists of their enemies. But Russia does. On May 14th it published a list of “unfriendly countries”. Oddly, it had only two names on it: the United States and the Czech Republic. The latter was unexpected, but explicable. In April the Czech government revealed that a deadly explosion in 2014 at an ammunition depot in the town of Vrbetice, previously thought accidental, was set off by Russian agents. (Some of the ammunition was destined for Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-backed rebels.) The Czechs and Russians have since expelled dozens of each others’ diplomats. Relations are now as sour as at any time since the Soviet Union collapsed (though not as bad as in 1968, when Moscow’s tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to overthrow a reformist government).That is inconvenient for the Kremlin. It needs friends inside the to stave off further sanctions over its latest misdeeds. Although most Czechs distrust Russia, it has long been able to count on the Czech president, Milos Zeman, a cantankerous populist who likes to set off explosions of a rhetorical kind. Mr Zeman questioned his own country’s intelligence agencies for blaming the blast on Russia. During a visit by Serbia’s president on May 18th he abruptly begged forgiveness for ’s bombardment of Belgrade in 1999, clearly trying to suggest that the Russians are not the only ones who go around blowing things up.