Earlier, the Senate’s committee on international affairs, defense and security said that Milos Zeman had misled the public when he said that а Novichok A-234 nerve agent had allegedly been produced in the country.
During their closed-door meeting last week, the members of the lower house of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee concluded that Novichok has never been produced or stored in the Czech Republic.
“The President did nothing to undermine the country’s security. All he did was to doubt the veracity of those who like to manipulate and hide the truth. Milos Zeman says many provocative things and by doing so has become a sort of a counterbalance to the brainwashing being done by mainstream media and our local right-wingers,” Mackovik said.
He added that just like MPs are not to be told what to say and where to go, they are not supposed to lecture the president about the things he says.
“It is up to the voters to decide who should hold top political positions or cite classified documents. President Zeman has the mandate of the majority of our people. He enjoys a degree of popular support many other political parties do not have, so their representatives are trying to criticize him,”
“The right-wing parties’ actions are destructive, especially when it comes to foreign policy and economics, always listening hard to what the EU and the White House are telling them.”
When asked whether this criticism of Zeman was an attempt to prevent him from speaking out on foreign policy issues, Stanislav Mackovik said that it most certainly was.
“They see him as a hindrance because he doesn’t go to watch NATO war games in the Baltic. Many of his critics have yet to realize that it wasn’t NATO that won the Second World War. This is an apparent attempt by all sorts of Russophobes not to let him speak about foreign policy,” he added.
“It’s little wonder that so many right-wing politicians are heaping praise on Sudetenland Germans while, at the same time, denying the Red Army’s role in defeating Nazism. These very politicians are pouring scorn on the Communist Party which criticizes the country’s foreign policy and of its participation in NATO’s events,” Stanislav Mackovik emphasized.
READ MORE: Czech Republic Never Produced or Stored "Novichok" — Government
In a televised interview earlier this month, Milos Zeman said that the substance, identified as А-234 and linked by UK experts to the Novichok group of nerve agents allegedly used to poison a former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter in the UK, may have been produced or stored in the Czech Republic.
Prime Minster Andrej Babis and the country’s intelligence dismissed the fact that the toxin had ever been produced or stored in the Czech Republic and said that the president’s statement had been “misunderstood.”