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The foreign ministers of the Visegrad Four, Germany and France are to meet in Prague on Monday, a day before a summit in Brussels focused on the United Kingdom’s plan to exit the European Union. The ministers are expected to discuss responsibility for the outcome of the Brexit vote, EU reform and possible personnel changes at the head of the bloc, the Czech News Agency reported. On Sunday the Czech foreign minister, Lubomír Zaorálek, said the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, bore responsibility for the outcome of the UK vote and should step down.

As reactions to Brexit pour in, the most common argument to be heard from Czech politicians is that Britain’s decision to leave the EU desperately signals the need for change. Will Brexit be the beginning of the end for the EU or is there a chance that the alliance can rally in the wake of this shock? And, are there fears that Britain’s decision will fuel the anti-EU camp here in the Czech Republic? Those are questions I put to the Czech State Secretary for EU Affairs Tomáš Prouza shortly after the outcome of the vote was announced. I began by asking

The decision by British voters for Great Britain to leave the EU has come as a major shock to many. In the Czech Republic, as elsewhere, politicians issued statements largely of regret but in some cases, congratulations that democracy had been served.

The Czech Republic is firmly convinced that the EU will be stronger with Britain, Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said in a statement published by the ctk news agency on Thursday. Mr. Sobotka expressed the hope that Britain’s vote would swing in favour of membership, saying that, today more than ever, when Europe needed to respond to common threats its fragmentation would be a big mistake. Given the war against terror, the migrant crisis and climatic changes Europe needs to unite rather than give way to nationalism, the prime minister said.

Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babiš said after a meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels on Friday that the EC had taken a positive stand to his proposal for clamping down on VAT fraud. Babiš said the EC had promised to present a draft legislation on reverse charge VAT by the end of the year. The Czech finance minister has sought the go ahead from fellow ministers for the Czech Republic to have the widest possible remit to use so-called reverse charge VAT, where the tax is paid by the consumer and not the seller. He believes that greater use of reverse charge could save the EU a large part of the around 170 billion euros lost every year in unpaid VAT.

Russia is attempting to “divide and conquer” the European Union by supporting right-wing populist politicians, says the Czech minister of foreign affairs, Lubomír Zaorálek. In an interview for the Financial Times, Mr. Zaorálek said Russia was taking advantage of the EU’s weakness and a response ought to be found. The foreign policy chief warned that Russian-backed right-wing populism could destroy the European mainstream. Speaking in connection with the UK’s upcoming EU referendum, Mr. Zaorálek said he was very afraid of the tendency toward fragmentation and warned against a repetition of the events of the 1930s.

The Czech Republic is set to reject an amendment to the European Firearms Directive aimed at making it harder for terrorists to acquire weapons. Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said he would do his best at a meeting in Luxembourg on Friday to persuade the backers of the proposal that it would not produce positive results. Both houses of the Czech Parliament have rejected the change, stating that terrorists use illegally acquired firearms, not legally held ones. The Czech Ministry of the Interior has produced a report suggesting that the amendment could impact the security of the country and cost thousands of jobs.

Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka will pay a two-day working visit to Moldova on June 9-10, the Office of the Government announced on Friday. The Czech prime minister will hold talks with his Moldovan counterpart Pavel Filip and President Nicolae Timofti. The talks are expected to cover Moldova’s ambition to join the EU, the crisis around Transnistria, a strip of land between the River Dniester and the eastern Moldovan border with Ukraine governed by Russian separatists, and bilateral ties, predominantly ways of boosting business and trade.

As of 2018, retailers in the Czech Republic will most probably be banned from providing plastic bags to customers free of charge. On Friday, the Government's Legislative Council recommended a new law on packaging, which would comply with new EU directives. The law has to be adopted by November of this year and would take effect from 2018. If this does not happen, the Czech Republic would face a fine of at least 54 million crowns from the EU. All big retailers in the Czech Republic have already started charging customers for plastic bags.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka has praised ministries for stepping up their pumping of European funds. Sobotka’s comments followed a meeting of the Council for Structural and Investment Funds, which includes most spending ministers. It was called in mid-May to deal with concerns that Czech attempts to pump the around 650 billion crowns on offer from 2014-2020 were progressing too slowly. The prime minister said ministries were attempting to simplify and streamline procedures so that applications can be deal with faster and funds accessed. The prime minister had earlier criticized the Ministry of Finance for slowing down the drawing a funds.