Czech President Petr Pavel has said that Russians living in Western countries should be “monitored” similar to the way people of Japanese descent were in the US during World War II.
“All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war,” Pavel told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an interview published on Thursday.
“I can be sorry for these 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,” he said. “That’s simply a cost of war.”
When asked what he meant by “monitoring,” Pavel said Russians should be “under the scrutiny of the security services.”
During World War II, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s orders, the US rounded up about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry and forcibly placed them in internment camps. The majority of the people were American citizens, and about half were children.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has previously called for the collective punishment of Russians for President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Last year, when asking Western nations to ban Russian travelers, Zelensky said the “whole population” of Russia was responsible for the war.
Source: AntiWar.
