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by The_Colonel 781 days ago
And then Czechia in 2021 randomly decided it's not worth it? (Russia did not cut access to their resources as a result anyway). Does not make sense.

The breakthrough in the investigation came only post 2018 as a result of Skripal poisonings where the same agents were involved. It took a while to connect the dots.
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surfingdino 781 days ago
The EU, Germany in particular, was not interested in making a big deal out of it for fear of getting cut off from the Russian teat. German economy was set up to run on Russian gas and oil and Germany has a lot of influence over Czechia so there was likely some pressure to keep things quiet. But in 2021 there was enough evidence on who did it and what was being planned to take action.
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The_Colonel 781 days ago
> But in 2021 there was enough evidence on who did it and what was being planned to take action.

Seems like you agree the reason it was not published before 2021 was that there wasn't enough evidence collected yet.

Isn't that the most parsimonious explanation? Why do you feel the need to add this superfluous German angle / Russian resources unfounded speculation?

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surfingdino 781 days ago
Because Germany is the biggest ally of Russia in the EU and has investments in Eastern Europe that benefit from cheap labour available in the region and cheap oil and gas from Russia (well, no more), so it was not interested in upsetting the status quo.
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stoperaticless 780 days ago
Vanishingly small amount of facts that affect us are proven in court or by scientific experiment.

When living on this world, one must do a lot of “speculation”, to derive most probable explanations based on limited information available. I guess one could call it “personal opinion”, “informed opinion”, or even “expert oponion” depending on the context.

In this specific case, worth remembering, that speed of investigations depend on resources allocated to it; resource allocation is easily impacted by politics.

Here is an unrelated example, but it illustrates an attempt to appease Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14202371 (there was European Arrest Warrant for ex-kgb guy over old eastern Europe stuff; in 2011 Austria detained him, but then swiftly released him within 24 hours)

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surfingdino 780 days ago
Austria? How not surprising at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria_and_Russian_intelligen...
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