The Converter

Tomio Okamura doesn't have to answer to Moscow to keep producing the outcomes Moscow wants

A year ago, Tomio Okamura's views on Ukraine would have been a talk-show controversy – today they are an official position of the second-highest office in the Czech state.

That change in address is the real story here, not the views themselves, which have circulated on the margins of Czech politics for a decade.

From comment section to chamber floor

Okamura was elected Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies on November 5, 2025, with 107 votes, as part of the coalition agreement that put his SPD party into government alongside Andrej Babiš's ANO and the Motoristé movement. Two days later, he had the Ukrainian flag, flying over the parliament building since 2022, taken down, filming himself holding the ladder for the man who removed it and calling the moment "a certain symbol." 

Opposition lawmakers from ODS and the Pirates responded by hanging Ukrainian flags from their own party offices in the same building. On January 17, Okamura removed the EU flag from his personal office as well, replacing it with a Czech one.

The backlash was immediate and, notably, came from across the Czech political spectrum. Pirates leader Zdeněk Hřib began collecting signatures for a dismissal vote. KDU-ČSL leader Marek Výborný compared Okamura's language to "collaborationist rhetoric" that Moscow would welcome. 

STAN leader Vít Rakušan wrote that Babiš can present himself abroad as a pro-Western, pro-Ukrainian prime minister, but at home had traded that image for legal cover, installing what Rakušan called a "political creature" at the head of the chamber in exchange for it. None of it stuck. Babiš's government survived its confidence vote on January 15 by a margin of 108 to 91, and Okamura kept the gavel.

Fear sells better than ideology

What Okamura is actually selling is not affection for Russia. It is exhaustion with the cost of opposing it. In his New Year address, he argued that money meant for Czech pensioners and people with disabilities should not be spent on weapons "to sustain a senseless war." His pitch for restoring Russian energy imports works on the same logic in a different key: why keep paying more when cheaper gas is available again, if Czechia simply stops treating where it comes from as a problem? 

Strategic dependency loses to a grocery-bill argument every time that argument is allowed to be the only one in the room.

This is fatigue politics in its purest form. Four and a half years into a war next door, exhaustion, inflation, and a longing for pre-war normalcy are real and widespread feelings across Europe, not something Okamura invented. 

What he does is collect those feelings, strip out anything that requires him to say a kind word about Russia, and convert them directly into a policy program that happens to want exactly what Russia wants: less funding for Ukraine, weaker sanctions, and a Czechia less entangled with NATO's collective response.

Where the aggressor goes missing

Okamura's own language for all of this is peace. Arms shipments, in his telling, prolong the war. Sanctions prolong the confrontation. Withdrawal, implicitly, is what finally opens the door to peace. ODS was blunt about where this framing leads, accusing Okamura of talk about a looming "Third World War" that supposedly serves Brussels' interests, and objecting sharply to his description of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as "insane."

Strip away the insults and a structural sleight of hand remains: in this construction, Russia starts a war, Ukraine receives weapons to defend itself, and somewhere in the retelling, the weapons become the problem rather than the invasion that made them necessary. Peace stops being what happens when Russia ends its war and quietly becomes what happens when Ukraine stops resisting it. 

An aggressor that disappears from the sentence structure of "peace talk" hasn't been forgiven. It has been edited out.

The neighbor becomes the enemy

The same erasure repeats at street level. In a June televised debate on Prima TV, Okamura said he would end temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees immediately if the decision were his, adding that there are simply too many of them and that Czech citizens are complaining. 

He went further, claiming his coalition had already blocked the EU's migration pact in December specifically to prevent what he called illegal migrants from being legalized under it, adding that Brussels might fine Czechia for the defiance.

ODS chairman Martin Kupka called the remarks outrageous and said they only reinforced what critics already call him: a "commercial fascist." Kupka's own numbers told a different story than Okamura's: roughly 400,000 Ukrainians working in Czech construction, healthcare, and social care, filling shortages the domestic labor market cannot cover on its own, and helping Czechia qualify for an exemption from parts of the same EU migration framework Okamura accuses Brussels of forcing on the country.

Whichever numbers Czech voters ultimately believe, the political function of the argument is the same either way. 

A war that used to be something happening to Ukraine becomes something happening because of Ukrainians, specifically the ones now living next door, working in a Czech hospital or on a Czech construction site. Anger that might otherwise be aimed at Moscow gets a much closer target instead.

Sovereignty that serves someone else

Okamura frames the entire program as sovereignty: a Czechia freed from Brussels' rules and Washington's wars, deciding things for itself again. Follow his actual policy preferences and the direction runs the opposite way. Cheaper Russian gas restores a dependency Czechia spent years trying to shed. 

Weaker sanctions restore Russian access to markets that isolation was designed to close. Reduced arms support and looser NATO coordination hand Moscow more room to maneuver on Europe's eastern edge, not less. A sovereignty movement whose signature policies all increase one specific foreign power's leverage over your country is describing itself incorrectly.

Converter, not the agent

IESS is not claiming Okamura answers to Moscow, and nothing in the public record suggests he does. That question, though, may simply be the wrong one. The more useful question is whether direct instruction is even necessary anymore, when a domestic political ecosystem, fear of cost, exhaustion with the war, resentment of newcomers, distrust of Brussels, can generate the same policy outcomes entirely on its own.

Seen that way, Okamura is not best understood as an agent. He is closer to a converter: ordinary Czech anxieties go in one end, and a foreign-policy program that happens to match Russia's strategic interest comes out the other, without a single instruction ever needing to cross a border. 

That should worry Czechia's allies more than a proven agent would, not less. An agent can be caught, named, and removed – a converter was elected, holds the gavel of the Chamber of Deputies, and currently sits two seats from the prime minister.