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The 11th annual Architecture Day has got underway in more than 100 cities and towns across Czechia and Slovakia. Despite its name, the festival will run for a whole week, offering free guided tours of famous buildings as well as lesser known architectural gems, but also lectures, concerts and family workshops.

Russia’s plan to annex more of Ukraine on Friday, following sham referendums in the occupied eastern regions of the country, have drawn widespread condemnation from Western democracies. Czechia, which currently holds the EU presidency, has slammed the move as "an unacceptable farce“.

This week Prague hosted a summit of the Pact of Free Cities, a cooperation agreement that was jointly signed nearly three years ago by the mayors of Prague, Bratislava, Warsaw, and Budapest. The pact has since grown in membership and now also includes Kyiv whose mayor, Vitaly Klitschko, was also present at the summit where support for Ukraine was at the center of focus. I asked one of the founding members of the Pact, Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, how Central Europe’s metropolises want to help.

On the occasion of Czech Statehood Day, the Czech Embassy in Canada organized a gala evening in Ottawa, awarding EU presidency medals to the Czech-Canadians who helped mold the close relationship between the two nations.

Czechia reinstated border controls with Slovakia for a period of ten days as of midnight Wednesday. The government ordered the move in connection with a sharp increase in illegal migration in recent weeks.

Around a hundred representatives of international education agencies across Europe gathered in Prague this week to discuss current challenges facing the Erasmus+ program. The so-called Directors' Meeting is traditionally organised by the country holding the EU presidency, which is currently Czechia.

With inflation at over 17 percent and energy prices expected to go through the roof in the autumn, economizing has become the order of the day for the vast majority of Czechs. According to polls, eighty percent of Czechs are feeling the crunch, a third of them “very strongly”.

Four out of ten people in Czechia expect that they will be doing the same job until they retire and a further 20 percent believe that they will be doing the same job for at least another decade, according to a survey conducted by the Data Collect agency for personnel company Předvýběr.cz. The survey shows that many Czechs are unwilling to get themselves requalified despite expectations of major changes on the demand side of the labour market.

The weekend municipal and Senate elections took place in an atmosphere of growing concern about soaring energy costs, inflation and the global security situation, raising fears that this might fuel nationalist and extremist tendencies. I asked commentator Jiří Pehe whether the election results gave any indication this could be happening.

The 21st Prague Fringe gets underway on Monday, with organisers promising one of the best editions yet. The week-long event will also feature an act from Ukraine – and the festival is planning to bring alternative theatre to Kyiv in future. I spoke to Prague Fringe founder Steve Gove.