The next day, the same thing happened again. The day after that, the same thing again. Every day of the first week of school, Czech schoolchildren had to be evacuated from their classrooms.
The authorities are investigating, and there appears to be a Russian connection. If so, this marks the latest in a wave of attacks on everyday life for Europeans using tactics honed by the Putin regime, including the targeting of energy and data infrastructure, assassination plots, cyber-warfare, and the sabotage of railways and arms manufacturers.
This is how grayzone aggression works: almost nothing is out of bounds, the opportunities for innovation are endless, and ratcheting up the costs and disruption for your enemy is easy.
The emailed bomb threat that reached hundreds of Czech schools could have come from any wicked mind. “Dnipropetrovsk maniacs will welcome you. Our telegram: [the sender refers here to a Telegram account]. We inform you that your building has been mined. We won’t dictate the terms to you because you don’t care. We’re just going to see a lot of blood and sacrifice. I will kill you and your children! Activation of explosive devices at 12:00. Time is up. The game begins!” it read. Frightened teachers swiftly evacuated the children in their care.
When a similar threat arrived the following day, it was clear that the sender had a very special kind of motivation. When renewed bomb threats were delivered on August 28, 29, and 30, it was obvious that someone was waging an orchestrated campaign against Czech children, their teachers, and their parents — indeed, against the whole country.
The threats bear a striking resemblance to similar campaigns in Ukraine, where such warnings have been common, especially at the start of the school year. In 2021, before the all-out war, there were a total of 1,100 threats and 300 in the first three weeks of 2022. The SBU, Ukraine’s intelligence service, blamed Russia and said the threats aimed “to place additional pressure on Ukraine and to sow alarm and panic among the public. Unfortunately, such informational-psychological special operations are the reality of modern hybrid wars.”
Czech authorities are investigating several lines of inquiry, the Czech news website Seznam Zprávy reported. Early clues, though, are to be found in the sender’s reference to a Telegram account, the reference to the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs (two Ukrainian mass murderers), and the fact that the Czech-language message appears to have been written by someone whose mother tongue is Russian or Ukrainian and subsequently machine-translated.
“In fact, not one of the seven sentences in the text sounds completely Czech, although none of the sentences contain clear grammatical or spelling errors,” the Czech linguist Tomáš Glanc told Seznam Zprávy. What’s more, the reference to Dnipropetrovsk suggests the message comes from Russian-occupied Ukraine, Glanc told the website, as “Ukrainians understand the name Dnepropetrovsk as a reference to the unfree period of Soviet rule controlled from Moscow.” These days, the central Ukrainian city is known as Dnipro.
A Russian link is unproven, but more than likely. While senders’ email addresses can be based anywhere, and the school emails could have originated in virtually any country, the signal the messages are intended to send is that Czech children are not safe. That’s an extremely upsetting reality for children who are used to going to school every day just like everyone else.
Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago, Ukrainian children were also used to going to school every day without having to worry about anything worse than bullies. Now, their daily lives involve the prospect of having to stay home because their schools aren’t safe, or being evacuated to makeshift schools in safer locations like underground stations. These days, Kharkiv even has a purpose-built underground school.
The government in Prague and local councils across the country now face the dilemma of how to respond: should they show defiance and defy the sender’s threats, or should they emphasize duty of care and evacuate each time a new threat arrives? Either way, the threats have already harmed Czech society.
Indeed, the threats against schoolchildren are the latest installment in the gray zone aggression facing Western countries.
Why would the Kremlin target the Czech Republic? Perhaps because the government of Petr Fiala has been such a staunch ally to Ukraine — it is the 10th largest individual contributor to Kyiv with aid totaling 0.7% of GDP — and its president, the former senior NATO general, Petr Pavel, is an unflinching supporter of the war effort. The government and head of state were behind an initiative to deliver as many as 100,000 artillery shells a month to Ukraine and shipments are now underway.
But the truth is that any country could be a target. The threats are cheap, easily organized, and can be hidden behind a veil of internet cut-outs, which make attribution very hard.
In this new Cold War, there’s no trace of the traces of gentlemanly behavior that even the Soviets observed. That’s an unsettling reality and a reason for all Western countries to become even more vigilant. What’s next, preschools?
Hyper-vigilance and monitoring of all manner of potential anomalies must become as natural a part of national defense as soldiers and weapons.
Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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