How do you crowdfund enough money to buy a tank or a Black Hawk helicopter? A couple of thousand Czech crowns at a time, it seems.
An online campaign in the Czech Republic began collecting donations shortly after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, raising funds to buy weapons, ammunition and other crucial gear for the Ukrainian army.
“When people feel desperate and feel like they cannot do anything, they send us 100 crowns [€4] or 1,000 crowns [€40},” says Jan Polak, one of the directors of the Gift for Putin campaign, a non-profit organisation supporting Ukraine’s defence against Russia.
The viral fundraising effort has, remarkably, bought more than €50 million worth of military hardware and weapons for Ukraine over the past four years, he says.
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There have been rolling campaigns raising money for drones and ammunition, and they are currently collecting funds to purchase battlefield ambulances
There is a reliable bump in donations around August 20th each year, when Czech people donate 1968 crowns (€80) to mark the anniversary of Soviet forces invading then-Czechoslovakia in 1968, which snuffed out a push for liberal reforms during communist rule.
“They came with the tanks and we did not defend ourselves, we just surrendered,” Polak says. It remains a painful scar on the nation’s psyche. “People who remember this, they know that nobody wants to have Russians ruling their country. So I think this is one of the [main reasons] why we are helping.”
About 400,000 Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war have settled in the Czech Republic. Only Germany and Poland, both much larger countries, have taken in more. In proportion to its population, the Czech Republic has accepted more Ukrainians than any other European Union state.
A new hard-right government in Prague plans to stop sending military aid to Kyiv and wants restrictions on which Ukrainians would be offered refugee “protection” in the EU, a marked change.
The previous administration led by Petr Fiala came to be defined by its enthusiastic support for Ukraine, internationally and at home. Two years ago you couldn’t have a conversation with someone without it turning to the war.
Recent elections point to signs of “Ukraine fatigue” in a Czech population under pressure from rising living costs.
Fiala’s centre-right coalition lost the October general election to right-wing populist Andrej Babis, who promised to undo certain austerity measures and reduce military aid to Ukraine.
The Babis government has talked about tightening the EU-wide criteria for Ukrainian refugees to qualify for “temporary protection”, to exclude men of working age and people who lived farther from the front lines, in areas such as western Ukraine. Those proposed changes – a significant departure from current rules – would need to be agreed at EU level in Brussels.
There was already a large Ukrainian population in the central European state before the war, which is partly why so many refugees fleeing the conflict ended up here. People had friends, relatives and other connections to lean on.
Anna Lehka, a 22-year-old Ukrainian graduate living in Prague, was in Kyiv when the war started. She jokes that she slept through the first few hours of the war. Her stepfather woke her up to tell her Russia had invaded.
“The evening before, I was preparing for my first economic seminar in university,” she says.
Her family fled the Ukrainian capital in the night, but when the fighting continued to intensify her family thought it would be safer to get her out of the country. “My mom and my family were quite worried about me as I am an only child,” she says.
Lehka, then 18, was put on a bus full of women and children heading to the Polish border. It was a journey hundreds of thousands of others made in those early weeks.
She thought she would be gone for about three months. That was four years ago.
“I was alone without my family and it was pretty scary,” Lehka says. She waited for five hours in the cold to cross the border. “I was by myself with one backpack of warm clothes and documents, food, nothing more,” she says. Her mother had a friend in the Czech Republic, so that’s where she went.
Her father, who was in Poland at the time, was heading in the opposite direction. A former soldier, he travelled back to Ukraine to join the fight when the war began.
[ Making a killing: Boom times for Europe’s defence industryOpens in new window ]
Lehka initially continued her studies in Masaryk University in Brno, a city in the southeast of the country, before moving to Prague last year.
She says she felt helpless while following the news of the war from afar. “I’m the type of person who just wants to do something, to volunteer, to help ... you feel the need to help your country.”
Lehka got involved with Generation for Ukraine, a civil society organisation in Prague set up by a group of young Ukrainians, to raise funds and help new arrivals integrate into Czech society.
Diana Harnyk (22), one of the group and a final-year political science student, says it feels like people are starting to forget about Ukraine.
Harnyk, who was studying in Kyiv when Russia invaded, says she worries the conflict in Iran will pull the world’s focus away. “The Czech people are doing their bit and helping, even though the government is not so pro-Ukraine,” she says.
Babis, a fan of US president Donald Trump, has followed through on his campaign talk since becoming prime minister at the start of December.
He joined Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s populist leader Robert Fico in refusing to contribute to a €90 billion loan which the EU planned to jointly borrow and extend to Ukraine.
Orbán and Fico, outliers in Brussels for maintaining friendly relations with Russia, have at different times obstructed efforts by other EU states to support Kyiv or sanction Moscow.
The populist trio told a summit of EU leaders in December they would not block the rest of the union from pushing ahead with the €90 billion loan once the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia were not on the hook for any financial contributions.
Under pressure in tight parliamentary elections this month, Orbán has made his anti-Kyiv stance a key plank of his campaign. The Hungarian has gone back on his word and vetoed the release of the €90 billion, infuriating fellow European leaders. Without the cash, it is estimated Ukraine could begin to run short of money in the coming weeks.
However, Babis wants to put distance between himself and Orbán and Fico, according to one senior source briefed on confidential summit discussions.
The Czech premier indicated to other national leaders that while the Czech Republic would not be party to the EU loan, that should not be taken as a sign he would always sit in the same camp as Orbán and Fico.
Observers say Babis, a billionaire businessman, is at his core more pragmatic than ideological.
“It’s not that the government is pro-Russian, it’s rather that they don’t really care about foreign policy,” says Pavlína Janebová, research director at AMO, an international relations think tank in Prague.
Babis previously served as prime minister from 2017-2021, but became tangled in a corruption scandal involving accusations that parts of his vast business empire had inappropriately drawn down public funds.
He tapped into frustrations with steep living costs to stage his political comeback. He promised something for everyone, from tax cuts to pension increases, and said aid to Ukraine could be better spent at home.
The Ukraine war was “the key issue” for the previous government to the point it became a political vulnerability, Janebová says.
“I would say that the Fiala government could have cared more for the domestic policy, because they were very much focused on Ukraine and the international dimension of governing, but there were some shortcomings on the domestic scene,” she says.
The general public have become less enthusiastic in their support for Ukraine’s fight, but still view the welcome offered to refugees positively, Janebová says.
Babis’s populist ANO party leads a hard-right coalition that includes two extreme junior partners, the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) and the anti-establishment Motorists’ party. Babis very much views himself as the boss, in both ANO and the coalition.
Janebová says she had predicted Babis might want to maintain the “appearance” of supporting Ukraine, to earn some credit with other European leaders. “I don’t really think he cares that much. I overestimated that, so that’s surprising for me,” she says.
Babis had criticised a Czech-led initiative that co-ordinates the supply of large-calibre artillery shells to Ukraine, donated or purchased by Nato allies. The prime minister says his administration will continue its co-ordinating role, but will stop contributing to the money used to buy shells.
“We should stand behind Ukraine and we should push our politicians to stand behind them and we should stop Russia in the eastern part of Ukraine,” says Polak, organiser of the Gift for Putin campaign.
Failing to give Ukraine what it needs to halt the Russian advance raises the prospect of Moscow’s forces threatening EU states in future, he says. “We would have them at our border, or in our lands.”
The message from Babis during his first few months back in charge has been clear: Yes, Russia is the bad guy, but don’t expect the Czech government to reach into its pocket to help Ukraine any more.
