NewsTracker Answers for week of May 03, 2021

Q: Bulgarian prosecutors said last week they are investigating whether four explosions at weapons depots over the past decade were part of a Russian effort to disrupt the flow of arms from Eastern Europe to battlefields in Ukraine and Georgia. Where is Bulgaria?

Circle the area on this map


Q: The Czech Republic also suspects that Russian agents blew up two of its ammunition depots in 2014. The Czechs and Bulgarians are both …

A. European Union members

B. Former Soviet allies

C. Members of NATO alliance

D. All of the above


D. Before it collapsed in 1991, the Russian dominated Soviet Union led a military alliance with seven of its “satellite states” including Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia peacefully separated to become the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Bulgaria and the Czech Republic later joined European Union (EU) and the NATO military alliance led by the U.S.


Q: Bulgaria expelled a Russian diplomat after announcing the investigation into the blasts and the poisoning of a Bulgarian arms dealer. Czech authorities linked the explosions in their country to the same two Russian agents named in the 2018 poisoning of a former double agent and his daughter in which nation?

A. Britain

B. France

C. Germany

D. United States


A. Sergei Skripal is a former Russian spy who worked as a double agent for the British. He and his daughter were poisoned in Britain with the Russian-developed Novichok nerve agent. That is the believed to be the same poison used on the Bulgarian arms dealer in 2014 and Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in Siberia last year.


Q: Ukraine and Georgia were ruled by the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. They became independent countries in 1991, but Russia troops invaded parts of both nations after their leaders sought closer ties to the West including NATO. How many independent states were created when the Soviet Union collapsed?

A. 5

B. 10

C. 15

D. 20


C. Russia is the internationally recognized successor state to the Soviet Union. Fourteen other nations declared independence – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.


Q: The Czech Republic expelled 18 Russian diplomats it identified as spies. Three former Soviet states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – expelled Russian diplomats to show solidarity with the Czech Republic. Those three nations are known as the . . .

A. Allied states

B. Baltic states

C. Caucasus states

D. Central Asian states


B. The three nations on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea have joined NATO as have all of the “satellite states” which were once Soviet allies. But, Russian President and former Soviet spy Vladimir Putin has warned that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO would be considered “a direct threat” to his country. Putin called the Baltic states “openly hostile” to Russia.