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On Monday, March 7, hundreds of guests are expected to gather at Prague Castle for an awards ceremony which will see state honours handed out for the first time since 2019. The ceremony has been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and several leading state dignitaries have announced that they will boycott the event in view of the president’s previous cordial relations with Vladimir Putin.

As a security expert focused on media and the internet, Roman Máca has been very busy lately, monitoring a rise in activity among pro-Russian online voices linked to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Máca, who works for the Institute for Politics and Society, has also been drawing attention to radical individuals, some of whom he calls Putin's Czech "legion".

Employees at the Brno-Řečkovice shooting range have decided to do their bit in helping Ukrainians defend their country by providing free weapons handling and tactical training courses to those men looking to return to their homeland and fight. Many of the fresh students have never held a gun before, says organiser Josef Kraus. I asked him how the idea to start offering weapons training began.

Despite repeated intelligence warnings, many were caught by surprise when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week. One of those who predicted that this was likely to happen was  Jan Kofroň, an international relations scholar at Charles University’s  Faculty of Social Sciences. I caught up with him earlier this week to discuss his impressions of the conflict thus far and began by asking him why he thought it was likely that Vladimir Putin would order the invasion.

For many years the NGO Memory of Nations has been recording the testimonies of Czechs who suffered under the Nazi and Communist regimes. Now the group has a new focus: raising money to buy materials directly for the Ukrainian Army.

In response to a request by the Ukrainian public broadcaster UA:PBC, Czech Radio has launched an internet stream of the UA:PBC radio broadcast in Ukrainian. The stream will be available on the audio portal and in the mobile application mujRozhlas.cz. The aim of the project is to make information about the war in Ukraine available daily to refugees and Ukrainians in the Czech Republic. Czech Radio’s external service, Radio Prague International, will also launch a new podcast next week called “News for Ukrainians in the Czech Republic,” which will focus on practical information for Ukrainian refugees in Czechia.

Alla Větrovcová is a former Radio Prague International journalist who now lives in the suburbs of Kyiv. She described life in Ukraine’s capital as locals wait out the Russian attacks.

The Czech government is further intensifying its efforts to aid Ukraine. Systems are being put in place to help the Ukrainian refugees entering the country every day and ministers say a state of emergency from Friday will accelerate the process of welcoming thousands of new arrivals.

The democratic world is exerting unprecedented economic pressure on Russia to try to stop the country’s aggression in Ukraine. How effective have the sanctions been so far and will they be enough to stop Putin? And how is the crisis in Ukraine going to impact the global and European economy? Those are some of the questions I put to Tomáš Sedláček, a leading Czech economist, university lecturer and a former member of the National Economic Council.

Horrified by images of suffering from Ukraine, many Czechs are setting off in cars and vans to deliver aid themselves to people on the country’s borders – and ferrying refugees back to the Czech Republic. I spoke to two young men who drove to Prague four women and two children from the Ukrainian frontier.