Prague, July 28 (CTK) – President Milos Zeman is a Russian Trojan horse in an information war, the European Values think tank said on Thursday when unveiling a study on Czech websites that serve disinformation purposes.
In reaction to this, Zeman’s spokesman Jiri Ovcacek dismissed the allegations, calling them blank chatter like that from the normalisation era [the 1970s, when Communist hard-liners came to power after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia].
“In the Czech space, Milos Zeman plays the role of a Trojan horse of Russia, systematically accepting and repeating the basic arguments of Kremlin’s positions,” Jakub Janda, one of the authors of the study, said.
“The Russian propaganda then repeatedly uses and depicts him as a friend of Putin,” Janda said.
He cited as an example Zeman’s statement, produced by the Russian propaganda, that the Ukrainian government had passed a language law due to which one-third of Ukrainian citizens could not communicate in their mother tongue.
Ovcacek said this was part of a campaign against the head of state.
He said the fight against Russian propaganda was a profitable business.
Ovcacek questioned the independence and financing of the European Values.
He said on the Twitter that its activities had been sponsored with over 350,000 crowns by the Education Ministry and Foreign Ministry headed by the Social Democrats (CSSD).
The European Value takes part in the government National Security Audit. Its eleven recommendations plan the establishment of the Centre of Terrorism and Hybrid Threats that is to combat the dissemination of false information at Interior Ministry as of next year.
