Stetina, Jaromir

Stetina was from the bourgeois and at the same time communist environment. His grandmother was one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party , and his maternal grandfather lived in Chicago , where he owned a pub called Prague. Father Jaromir worked at the embassy in China .

Shtetina grew up in a border region in the north of the Czech Republic, where his parents moved in 1945, and where Yaromir graduated from high school.

In the period from 1961 to 1967, Jaromir Stetina studied at the University of Economics in Prague. In 1968, he began working as a journalist in the Mladá Fronta newspaper. During Operation Danube, the Soviet army took control of Mladá Fronta. Stetina was subsequently fired due to his disagreement with the new leadership. After his dismissal, he worked as a surveyor , at the same time studying geology at Charles University in Prague. In early 1969, he was a laborer at the Geological Survey enterprise. In the period from 1970 to 1999, he conducted about twenty-five scientific and sports expeditions in Siberia and Asian countries; is the founder of Czech rafting . In the same years, the most famous book “S matyldou ro Indu” was written on the subject of rafting.

In 1987, Jaromir Shtetina began to speak publicly. From 1987 to 1989, he held a series of political lectures in Czechoslovakia. In 1989, he became one of the founders of the syndicate of journalists, eventually resuming his career as a journalist, working for the newspaper Lidové noviny . In 1990 he began working as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, where he described numerous conflicts that took place in the Soviet Union. In 1992, he founded the Lidových novin Foundation. In 1993-1994 he was the editor-in-chief of Lidové noviny. In 1994, he founded the independent reporting agency, Epicentrum, dedicated to military reporting.

Stetina specializes in describing military conflicts in Europe, Asia and Africa, having visited more than 20 countries. In addition, he published 10 books and countless articles, and also shot dozens of documentaries.

In 2004, during the elections to the Senate (the upper house of parliament of the Czech Republic), Shtetina ran as an independent candidate with the support of the Green Party. After winning the election, he assumed the position of senator from the 10th Prague District.

Stetina is one of the initiators of the signing of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism .

Currently, being a member of the European Parliament from the Czech Republic, he is the deputy head of the Committee on Security and Defense.

Since 2014, Jaromir Shtetina has been interested in the political situation in Ukraine and traveled around the country several times on his own initiative. In August of the same year, in an interview for Radio Journal, he called Russia the “Empire of Evil.”

In 2016, Shtetina was one of three deputies of the European Parliament who visited the city of Marinka, located in close proximity to Donetsk.

On April 12, 2016, he voted in favor of the resolution of the European Parliament, which approved the proposal of the European Commission, led by Jean-Claude Juncker, to introduce mandatory quotas for the permanent redistribution of refugees between EU member states in response to the European migration crisis.

• Website of Jaromir Stetin , MEP (in Czech. )