Czech President Petr Pavel said that Western security services should closely monitor all Russian nationals living in Western countries in a recent interview with Radio Free Europe (RFE) on Wednesday, June 14th, suggesting WWII-like measures, and calling it “simply the cost of war.”
While he has empathy for Russians who have to suffer the consequences of the Kremlin’s decisions, the Czech leader said, “when there’s an ongoing war, the security measures related to Russian nationals should be stricter than normal times.”
While Ukrainian refugees across the West number several million, hundreds of thousands of Russians also fled their country after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some fleeing economic hardships, others seeking to escape conscription.
According to President Pavel, the flight of refugees means that the Kremlin has an easier job placing spies and agitators in Europe and North America. Regardless of the fact that some 6.6 million Russians were already living in these countries before the war, the President believes that:
All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war.
Then the president went on to draw a rather unfortunate historical parallel that generated backlash across media platforms:
I can be sorry for these people, but at the same time when we look back, when the Second World War started, all the Japanese population living in the United States were under a strict monitoring regime as well.
That’s simply the cost of war.
During World War II, the Roosevelt administration forced over 120,000 people of Japanese descent—most of whom were American citizens, and half of them children—into internment camps complete with barbed wire fences surrounded by armed U.S. Army guards, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Even if the measure seemed like the “cost of war” back then, America came to regret the events later, with President Reagan formally apologizing for the treatment of the Japanese-Americans in 1988. Earlier this year, U.S. President Joe Biden said that sending people to “inhuman concentration camps simply because of their heritage” boiled down to “one of the most shameful periods in American history.”
Part of the reason that Pavel, a retired military general, came to power—after a record turnout in the Czech presidential election in January—is due to his strong stance on the war in Ukraine and the charismatic, straightforward manner he communicates his opinion, which he no doubt picked up in the army.
However, the WWII reference might have been a bit too blunt even for him, as his office rushed to offer clarifications following the interview. According to a presidential spokesman, by referring to the Japanese, Pavel in no way meant “internment or any type of persecution,” and by calling to monitor “all Russians,” he actually meant only “those presenting risk factors.”
