Russland und Ukraine heute, Erfahrungsbericht

In the organizer's words:

Russia and Ukraine today, field report
Discussion with the journalist and activist Petra Procházková
Moderation: Libuse Cerna, Languages: German and Czech

Petra Procházková has been working as a correspondent for various media in the Czech Republic for more than 30 years. She reports continuously from the countries of the former Soviet Union and is committed to helping people who are suffering from the ongoing wars and armed conflicts. The Czech journalist is a proven expert on the entire area of the so-called CIS states.

Petra Procházková (* October 20, 1964 in Český Brod) is a Czech journalist and humanitarian aid worker. She became known for her reporting on the armed conflicts in the Caucasus after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has also worked in Afghanistan. She wrote for Lidove noviny for almost 30 years and moved to Deník N in 2018.

Petra Procházková studied at the Faculty of Journalism at Charles University. In 1992, she was sent to Russia and the Caucasus as a foreign correspondent and war correspondent. Her first reports came from Abkhazia. In 1994, she founded the private journalistic agency Epicentrum. She wrote for Lidové noviny, the Slovakian daily SME, the weekly Týden and other magazines. She reported from Ossetia, Abkhazia, Georgia, Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh and Afghanistan as well as on refugee camps and burnt Kurdish villages in Kurdistan. She was also able to get among the guerrilla fighters in East Timor. For several years she was interested in the Chechnya issue and was an eyewitness to the bombing of Grozny by the Russian army in 1994. When militants led by Shamil Basayev attacked the town of Budyonnovsk and took control of the local hospital, she - and several other journalists - offered themselves as hostages for the hospital patients. In 2000, she interrupted her journalistic activities and devoted herself intensively to independent humanitarian work in Grozny for a year. There she founded a children's home for fifty war orphans, which she still looks after today. In the same year, she was declared persona non grata by the Russian authorities and had to leave Russia. In 2001 and 2002, she worked as a correspondent and reporter in Afghanistan. Together with Jana Hradilkova, she founded the citizens' association Berkat (Chechen for "happiness") in 2001, which helps children, women and other people in Chechnya, Afghanistan and refugees in the Czech Republic.

She has been Lidove noviny's correspondent in Ukraine since 2014. Since October 2018, she has been working for the daily newspaper Deník N.