Let’s help the Russians who don’t want to go to war
Nevertheless, at the risk of being without dinner and possibly without Saturday lunch, I dare say otherwise. We should help Russians who do not want to fight for Putin’s Russia in every possible way. To get out of Russia and apply for a residence permit. And those who do not prove to be a security risk for the Czech Republic and the EU should obtain some kind of residence permit in the Czech Republic.
The Russians’ Nightmare: Mobilization is resisting. He’d rather break his arms or choose prison
The Russians, many of whom recovered only at the moment when they are in real danger of being called up and having to go and die on the Ukrainian front, of course do not deserve to be treated like Ukrainian refugees. They fled from Russian aggression.
But what has been happening in the Czech Republic in recent months towards the local Russian community is simply not good. I have been an opponent of the principle of collective guilt all my adult life. The principle that Czechoslovakia applied to Sudeten Germans. With the legally twisted exception that whoever proved that he was persecuted by the Nazi regime, locked up in a concentration camp, could stay here.
If they applied this principle of collective guilt to the Czech population after the fall of the communist regime, then only a few hundred thousand people would remain in the Czech Republic. People who could prove that they actually stood up against totalitarianism and were persecuted by the totalitarian regime for that.
Today, we have become accustomed to looking at the Russians, the entire more than forty million inhabitants of the Russian Federation, as the vineyards of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Yes, to some extent it is. Putin did not come to power in an armed coup, but in relatively democratic elections. And even in conditions when the Russians did not have to vote for him, a large part of them voted for him. Likewise, a large part of Russians welcomed Putin’s occupation of Crimea, even including many of Putin’s most visible opponents, such as Alexei Navalny or Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And including many Russians living in the Czech Republic.
Putin is in a corner. He declared a mobilization and the destruction of the world is threatened
But again, let’s look in the mirror of recent Czech history. How many people opposed the communist coup in February 1948. How many people fleeing Czechoslovakia after the August 1968 invasion served the regime or were even members of the party, sometimes even high officials. And yet the West did not return them and they were granted asylum.
Despite the fact that a few thousand people actively opposed the totalitarian regime during normalization, the West did not write us off. He supported dissidents and did not return those who managed to get behind the Iron Curtain.
The goal is to weaken Putin
We have a choice. Either we will help the Russians fleeing Putin’s conscription orders, or the same people will fight against us, not of their own free will. These Russians are also the period of German soldiers who surrendered en masse to the Western Allies in the last months of the war. No one was particularly unwelcome, they went to prison camps, but they were treated decently.
On the Eastern Front, where they were threatened with “half-death” in Siberia, they fought desperately to the end. And it cost hundreds of thousands of needless victims. Let’s not make this mistake. Any thing that weakens Putin is good. Including us northern mass desertion of his conscripts.