In the first half of this year, Russia conducted a wide range of hybrid operations against the Czech Republic. The goal of his propaganda is to weaken trust in the state and to make people feel that the regime there is a healthy alternative. This follows from the report on extremism for the first half of this year, which was published today published Ministry of Interior.
According to the ministry, the Czech extremist and xenophobic populist scene has changed significantly and the Russian security forces in the Czech Republic have gained a solid and easily influenced base for spreading their influence.
“Russia has continuously conducted hybrid operations against the Czech Republic, and a number of institutions have repeatedly become the target of cyber attacks. When I add to this that the police detained a Colombian suspected of arson on the order of the Russian security forces, it is clear that Russia is attacking us with all possible means,” said the minister interior Vít Rakušan (STAN). A man suspected of arson in the garages of a municipal transport company in Prague 9 was detained by the police at the beginning of June, he is accused of a terrorist attack.
According to the report, former ideological dogmas and divisions ceased to apply on the Czech extremist scene, previously preferred topics related to the Czech Republic lost their importance and were replaced by topics with an international dimension. According to the ministry, the Kremlin’s propaganda, which determines which group will be attacked the most in a given period, has an influence on determining the narratives. However, according to the ministry, hateful rhetoric was only one of the components of pro-Russian propaganda. According to the report, the priority goal is no longer to evoke negative emotions towards various minorities, but to convey narratives that resonate with the “Kremlin vision of the world”.
However, it was also possible to observe anti-migrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic or anti-Ukrainian content in the so-called quasi-media coverage. According to the report, their authors use certain patterns in the creation of these contents, which they only supplement with various variables. “If the quasi-media scene begins to use the possibilities of artificial intelligence and automatically generated contents, it will be able to multiply its production and overwhelm the media space,” warned the authors of the report.
This year, according to the ministry, the so-called anti-system movement continued to be on the scene, but it ran into fragmentation, the absence of a vision and the short “lifetime” of its main representatives. According to the Ministry of the Interior, supporters of the movement further copied the Russian view of the war in Ukraine. According to the report, some right-wing extremists also became supporters of the Kremlin regime. According to the ministry, only anarchists and some neo-Nazi activists remained faithful to their former ideological starting points. According to the report, simple racist attacks have traditionally appeared mainly in the environment of Czech football.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, more and more politicians and activists who do not belong to the traditional extremist and xenophobic populist spectrum began to use nationalism, primarily as a tool to attract voters. They are also resorting to xenophobic shortcuts, which, according to the report, was shown in the results of the European Parliament elections.
Source: www.tyden.cz
