Did the Czech government pay Ukrainian refugees to demonstrate against Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico during the meeting of the Visegrad Four (V4) in Prague on February 27, 2024? No, that's not true: According to the organizers of the protest, most of the participants were Czech and Slovak activists who wanted to express their opinions and were not paid to do so.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on March 14, 2024. The man in the video said (translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff):
Czechs did not boo Fico. No way. Czechs did not boo Fico. I didn't see a single Czech flag there. Those I saw were Ukrainian. That scum paid by the government exactly for these occasions. Where a Czech wouldn't go, they'll shove Ukrainians there. That's how it is. Not otherwise. Ukrainians are paid here for these occasions. To protest, to go there, to put on maidans here. So they could then claim that Czechs [were involved]. I don't think a single Czech booed Fico, right. This is just another bogus scheme by [Prime Minister Petr] Fiala's and [Interior Minister Vit] Rakusan's Nazi government, by those two sons of bitches. They are all motherfuckers in that government. Well, now we have to wait for someone to liberate us because we have no men and balls to do so.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Mar 20 10:57:58 2024 UTC)
In his monologue, the TikTok user reacted to a protest on February 27, 2024, that Puls of Europe (archived here) and Kaputin (archived here), two Czech pro-European citizens' groups, had called for via Facebook (archived here) to express their rejection of the pro-Russian stance of the Slovakian and Hungarian prime ministers.
Tomasz Peszynski, the protest's organizer and Puls of Europe chairman, told Lead Stories in a phone interview on March 20, 2024, that most of the estimated three dozen protesters were Czech and Slovak activists. Peszynski said:
I knew two-thirds of them. They were Czechs who regularly attend such events. Those I did not know in person were Slovaks. I also know politically active Ukrainians in Prague and not a single one of them came.
According to the public registry (archived here), Puls of Europe was founded in the Czech Republic in 2017 to "support the European Union and European values, namely democracy, human rights, freedom, European and transatlantic cooperation and deeper European integration and orientation of the Czech Republic." The group does not receive any government funding, according to Peszynski, and its campaigns are financed by crowdfunding (archived here), voluntary member contributions and individual donors whose names can be seen on the Pulse of Europe's transparent bank account website (archived here).
Kaputin, the protest's second organizer, is an anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy grassroots group founded by Otakar van Gemund (archived here), a Prague-based Czech-Dutch activist, after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. In a phone interview with Lead Stories on March 20, 2024, van Gemund said:
No one was paid to protest. We were the organizers. We came up with this idea to show that Fico is not a democrat, is an ally of Putin and Russia and a backer of the Russian aggression and that we disagree with it. It costs us a lot of time and effort and we do this in our free time.
Kaputin members self-finance their protests and have not received any government funds to remain independent, according to van Gemund.
In an email sent to Lead Stories on March 20, 2024, Lucie Jesatkova, a Czech government spokeswoman, confirmed that the cabinet was not involved in the protest organization and has not supported the two groups financially. Jesatkova wrote:
The office of the government dealt with the V4 meeting itself. In no way the government interferes with a free civic initiative.
