Western intelligence services need to keep a “strict” watch on Russian citizens living abroad, according to Czech President Petr Pavel.
“When there is an ongoing war, the security measures related to Russian nationals should be stricter than normal times,” Pavel told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-backed outlet. “So, all Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past.”
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Pavel paired that recommendation with an emphasis on maintaining contact with Russian opposition figures and dissidents who could inform Western perspectives on Russia. Yet, as he assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin enjoys broad support among the Russian population, he adopted a wary posture even toward the Russians who have left their country since the launch of the full-scale invasion last year — a diaspora that includes about 1.3 million people, according to British intelligence assessments.
“They are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war,” Pavel said. “I think I can be sorry for the 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 an unattractive precedent for U.S. policymakers given the consensus that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s establishment of internment camps for Japanese Americans during the Second World War represented a grave abuse of American civil rights — an “objectively unlawful … morally repugnant order,” as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts described it in a 2018 opinion.
Pavel’s invocation of that order included no acknowledgment that the policy was applied to American citizens or involved internment on the basis of race. Still, the suggestion tends to evoke the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s warning that another wartime “panic” could lead to the adoption of an analogous abuse of rights.
“You are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia said in 2014. “It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again in time of war. It’s no justification, but it is the reality.”
Pavel’s remarks included specific references to Russian citizens, as well as his general sense that Putin has overwhelming support among the Russian population.
“I’ve heard that argument quite often, that we should only take it as Putin’s war, not a Russian war; it’s not a good argument,” he said. “When we look at the support that President Putin enjoys among the population, when we see how many people are supporting the war, how many people are even calling for extending the war on other countries, we have to call it a Russian war.”
Pavel said that he could “not imagine” having a meeting with Putin given that he is “so cynical, [willing] to lie almost on a daily basis,” even in dialogue with other heads of state.
“But hopefully once the situation develops, once Ukraine is more successful in their counteroffensive, I hope that it will bring even the Russian leadership to a different position,” Pavel said. “And they will probably be more willing to come out to a pragmatic negotiation. But at this point, I don’t see it.”
Pavel is a retired army general who was elected chairman of the NATO Military Committee in 2014, just months after the initial Russian invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. His victory in the Czech Republic’s presidential election in January was hailed as a fortification of the trans-Atlantic consensus in support of Ukraine, an effort that has seen Czech officials take a leading role in Europe over the last year and more.
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“We shouldn’t be so shortsighted [as] to isolate Russia entirely,” he said in reference to Russian opposition. “We should also look for other personalities that will appear eventually, the ones when the war is over, and the relations with Russia will start coming back to normal. We should probably offer an opportunity to those people who will be able and courageous enough to speak up — to invite them to different conferences, to let them speak in our universities — so that we understand the rationale behind the Russian actions.”
He added that “only then, when we understand how they think, [can we] come up with good measures and good proposals that will work.”
