Czech President Wants West To 'Monitor' Russians Like Japanese During WWII

Czech President Petr Pavel just took anti-Russian xenophobia to a new level, saying this week that he's in favor of Russians living in Western countries being "monitored" by authorities, akin to what happened with Japanese people living in the United States during World War II.

"All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war," Pavel told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a fresh interview published on Thursday. 

In the comments he actually directly invoked the historical example of people of Japanese descent being monitored and placed in internment camps during WWII as comparable to what should happen to Russians, defending it as the "cost of war". 

"I can be sorry for these people, but at the same time when we look back, when the Second World War started, all the Japanese population living in the United States were under a strict monitoring regime as well," he said. "That’s simply a cost of war."