News

The Czech government headed by Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, as well as Czech President Miloš Zeman, have called for the release of a group of seven OSCE observers, including a Czech national, who were ‘seized’ by separatists in eastern Ukraine. The observers were travelling with members of the Ukrainian military; rebels charged that one of the Ukrainians was a spy. Prime Minister Sobotka said the incident had only escalated the situation in Ukraine. Both he and President Zeman insisted the OSCE observers needed to be released and be allowed to go about their work – monitoring developments on the ground.

The police’s organized crime squad raided several Prague sites on Friday, including the headquarters of the Islamic Foundation, a cultural centre near Wenceslas Square, on suspicion of the illegal publishing and distribution of a book inciting racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, a spokesman for the organized crime squad said on Friday. One of the raids took place in the Islamic Foundation’s house of prayer, disrupting the religious gathering. One of the people present, the first secretary of the Indonesian Embassy, told the ctk news agency the police stormed the premises telling people to lie down face of the floor as they searched the grounds. Five people were arrested. The police did not specify what publication they were looking for.

Participants in a two-day Eastern Partnership summit in Prague have urged Russia to pull its troops from the Ukrainian border in order to prevent a further escalation of the conflict. In a joint proclamation they recommended a decentralization of Ukraine and offered to mediate talks between the two country’s officials. The meeting of EU representatives and six post-Soviet republics who are seeking to establish closer political and economic ties with the EU was dominated by the deepening crisis in Ukraine. The EU Commissioner for Expansion Štefan Fule told the gathering the crisis in Ukraine was the worst crisis in Europe since 1945 and a signal for the EU to give greater support to the EU’s Eastern Partnership Project. The Eastern Partnership was joined by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine during the Czech EU presidency in 2009.

Czech Defense Minister Martin Stropnický on Friday visited the Czech contingent in Mali deployed there within the EU military training mission in the country. The Czech military has 34 soldiers in Bamak and four more specialists at the military base in Kati. They are helping train the Mali Armed Forces. The government is expected to decide in the coming days whether to extend the mission’s mandate and expand the number of troops to 50.