Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has said that he has asked the European Council to condemn Russia for its involvement in the deadly explosion of an arms depot on Czech soil in 2014.

Asked whether he had brought up the explosion during an informal two-day summit of EU leaders taking place in Portugal, Babis told journalists on May 8 that he had “called for the [European] Council to condemn and declare such actions as unacceptable” when it presents its concluding statements at an EU summit scheduled to take place in Brussels later this month.

Babis said that he called on the council to make it clear “that it is impossible to accept such actions, and that we must view an attack on one [EU] member state as an attack on all.”

Babis on April 17 announced that investigators from the Czech intelligence and security services had provided “unequivocal evidence” that there was “reasonable suspicion regarding a role of members of Russian military intelligence GRU’s unit 29155 in the explosion of the munition depot in Vrbetice in 2014.”

Two men were killed in the blast.

In response, the Czech government announced the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats it considered to be spies, setting off a string of tit-for-tat moves between Prague and Moscow.

Russia has denied involvement in the explosion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent congratulations to fellow members of the Commonwealth of Independent States over their roles in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, and called for “brotherly friendship and mutual assistance” to mold their future relations.

The message, delivered on May 8, came as Western Europe celebrated the 76th anniversary of the war and ahead of Moscow’s Victory Day parade scheduled for May 9.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel marked the anniversary with a Twitter message saying that “it remains our everlasting responsibility to keep alive the memory of the millions of people who lost their lives during the years of National Socialist tyranny.”

On May 7, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also addressed Nazi crimes, saying: “Confronting National Socialism and the memories of injustice and guilt do not weaken our democracy. On the contrary, it strengthens its resistance and resilience.”

Based on dpa and TASS

Two Russian nationals are among four men who have pleaded guilty to cybercrimes that targeted banks and companies across the United States, resulting in millions of dollars of losses, the Justice Department said on May 7.

The four men — Aleksandr Grichishkin, 34, and Andrei Skvortsov, 34, of Russia; Aleksandr Skorodumov, 33, of Lithuania; and Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia — provided so-called “bulletproof hosting” services to a network of cybercriminals, according to court documents.

The bulletproof hosting operation rented Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, servers, and domains to cybercriminal clients who in turn used the technical infrastructure to disseminate malware that could gain access to victims’ computers and steal banking credentials, the Justice Department said in a news release.

“Over the course of many years, the defendants facilitated the transnational criminal activity of a vast network of cybercriminals throughout the world by providing them a safe-haven to anonymize their criminal activity,” said Special Agent in Charge Timothy Waters of the FBI’s Detroit Field Office.

The malware hosted by the organization attacked U.S. companies and financial institutions between 2009 and 2015, the Justice Department said.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid said organizations that aid cybercriminals in deploying malware are “no less responsible for the harms these malware campaigns cause, and we are committed to holding them accountable.”

According to court filings and statements made by the defendants, Grichishkin and Skvortsov were founding members of the operation and its proprietors.

All four pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to engage in a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) in U.S. District Court in Michigan. Each defendant faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison at their sentencing hearing later this year.

Law enforcement partners in Germany, Estonia, and the United Kingdom assisted the FBI in its investigation.

The Justice Department secretly obtained the phone records of three Washington Post reporters who wrote about the federal investigation into ties between Russia and former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, the newspaper said on May 7.

The action appears to have been aimed at identifying the reporters’ sources for stories published in 2017 during the early months of Trump’s administration as federal investigators scrutinized whether Trump’s 2016 campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the election.

The newspaper said the three reporters received notice that their phone records had been seized in letters dated May 3.

The Post said the Justice Department did not specify the purpose of the subpoena to obtain the records or identify any articles at issue, but the newspaper said the period in question was April 15, 2017, to July 31, 2017.

During that time the Post published a story about classified U.S. intelligence intercepts indicating that in 2016 Jeff Sessions, who would later become Trump’s attorney general, had discussed campaign issues with Russia’s then-ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

The phone records include who called whom, when calls were made, and how long calls lasted, but do not include what was said in the calls. Investigators often hope such records will lead them to the sources who leaked sensitive information to reporters.

The letters sent to the reporters do not say when the Justice Department approved the decision to subpoena their records, but a department spokesman said it happened in 2020 before the end of the Trump administration.

Cameron Barr, the Washington Post’s acting executive editor, demanded that the Justice Department say why it seized the data.

“We are deeply troubled by this use of government power to seek access to the communications of journalists,” Barr said in a statement. “The Department of Justice should immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs, an activity protected under the First Amendment.”

Justice Department guidelines for leak investigations mandate that such actions are allowed only when other avenues for obtaining the information have been exhausted, and that the affected reporters must be notified unless it’s determined that it would interfere with national security.

“While rare, the Department follows the established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone toll records and non-content email records from media members as part of a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” department spokesman Marc Raimondi said in a statement quoted by the Post.

Raimondi said the targets such investigations are not the reporters but “those with access to the national defense information who provided it to the media and thus failed to protect it as lawfully required.”

The Justice Department also said it had received a court order to get e-mail records from the reporters but did not obtain them. The e-mail records sought would have indicated who e-mailed whom and when but would not have included the contents of the e-mails.

With reporting by the Washington Post and AP