While marking 21 August as ‘The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia’, President of the Slovak Republic, Zuzana Caputova, took it to her Twitter handle to express grief over how the people fight for the freedom and democracy.
President Caputova mentioned via her Twitter handle that, “On Aug21 #1968 the hopes & dreams of an entire generation of Czechs&Slovaks were crushed by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. Soviet occupation lasted for 21 yrs. Today, with Russia’s attack on #Ukraine we are reminded again that the fight for freedom and democracy never ends.”
She further targeted Russia for invading into Ukraine, which they call as a full-scale military operation.
About the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia-
It refers to the events of 20-21 August, 1968, when four Warsaw Pact nations jointly invaded the Czechoslovakia Socialist Republic: The Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the Hungarian People’s Republic.
The invasion stopped Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring liberalisation reforms and empowered the authoritarian wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
Around 250,000 Warsaw Pact military men (afterwards rising to around 500,000), supported by over thousands of tanks and hundreds of aircraft, took part in the overnight operation, which was code-named Operation Danube. The Socialist Republic of Romania and the People’s
The Socialist Republic of Albania refused to participate. East German forces, except for a few specialists, were ordered by Moscow not to cross the Czechoslovak border just hours before the invasion. 137 Czechoslovaks were killed and 500 seriously wounded during the occupation.
At the same time, people’s reaction to the invasion was widespread and divided. Though, most of the Warsaw Pact favoured the invasion along with several other communist parties around the world, Western nations, along with Albania, Romania and specifically the People’s Republic of China (PRC), denounced the attack.