Miloš Zeman

Grotesque, crude and clearly insulting, the puppets are designed to grab attention and burst despotic bubbles. Meanwhile, Central European populists serving Moscow and Beijing's interests, like Czech President Milos Zeman and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, metamorphosise into giant slugs eating the lettuce leaf of democracy.

Right-winger Petr Fiala was named the Czech Republic's new prime minister on Nov. 28 in an unusual ceremony, with wheelchair-bound President Milos Zeman speaking from behind a plastic barrier because he has COVID-19.

But the ambitions of the president and the people around him in Prague Castle were about to take an even bigger hit. Minutes after the billionaire premier took his leave, Zeman was rushed to Prague's Central Military Hospital.

The hard-drinking, heavy-smoking and politically scheming 77-year-old president has not been seen in public since. No diagnosis has been released.

Nonetheless, President Milos Zeman, who wields the constitutional authority to appoint governments, invited the populist Babis - with whom he has a longstanding power pact - to meet on Sunday.

The local press was full of complaints over the tightly controlled event, which Orban stressed had definitely no connection to the upcoming election in Czechia but was merely a standard state visit. Naturally, then, the two premiers refused to take questions, but treated the few journalists admitted to an hour-long chat.

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted to being "pretty blunt about [the troop withdrawal] publicly… a rare thing when it comes to United States decisions." True to his confession of a lack of diplomacy, he added: "I think the [peace] deal that was done in Doha was a rotten deal. It effectively told a Taliban that wasn't winning that they were winning."

Populist President Milos Zeman told his favourite pro-Russian disinformation website Parlamentni listy that NATO's legitimacy has been called in question due to its failure in the Central Asian country. Claiming that NATO has left a void that will be filled by terrorism, Zeman also said Czechia should now focus its budget on national defence and no longer "waste money" on the alliance.

A 26-year-old evangelical Christian and theology student at Prague's Charles University, Roll founded Million Moments alongside Mikulas Minar in 2017. Dressed in his trademark mustard-yellow, it was the red-headed Minar who originally chaired the organisation and so featured prominently on the front pages as the biggest protests in the country since the Velvet Revolution erupted.

President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vui, pointed out that President of the Czech Republic, Milo Zeman's apology for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was historic, adding that he did not believe that NATO would ever apologize for those attacks.

"Worse than a crime" - that is how the Czech President described the bombing of Yugoslavia. At the time when the bombing was being decided upon, that country was in NATO for only a few weeks, and was the last one to give its consent, says Zeman, emphasizing that decision as a lack of courage.