On 8 September 2016, the Russian participants of the Project "Comic Star - Creative Inclusion" supported within the Open Call Mechanism (OCM) visited Budapest. There, three comics prepared as a cooperation of young people from troubled backgrounds with professional artists were presented at the H52 Youth Centre to the Hungarian public.

The stories turned out to be pretty different from each other. “Bad Company” by Olga Lavrentieva shows, how far addictions and alcoholism can lead somebody, but also manifestates that we all have our own choices. Two other comics by Gergely Oravecz are about responsibility and drug usage (“The Accident”) and bullying at school (“Why Always the Smaller?”).
 

The event was opened by representatives of project's cooperation partners - Marcell Lőrincz (Subjective Values Foundation, Budapest) and Sergei Simonov (German-Russian Exchange, St. Petersburg). They both expressed their happiness that the comics had been printed and exhibited already, while the stories would be used in youth groups, where these issues might be discussed.

Later the Russian group visited Eötvös József High School. Teenagers attended a Russian class. They didn't feel any language barrier and freely talked about the comics. Besides, they were also involved in activities by Sergei Simonov related to human rights.

'The visit was a great opportunity to bring our participants closer to each other,' sums up Olesia Kataeva, a leading trainer of the Russian group. 'We really felt we belonged into the joint good team now.'
 

'It is not just a great opportunity for all of us to cooperate,' added Krisztina Mogyoró, who was a trainer of the Hungarian workshops. 'We believe that our work is building a bridge between our two nations.'

By the way, on 5 October 2016, the exhibition was opened at the Comic Book Library in St. Petersburg.

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Tomáš Jungwirth (Association for International Affairs, Prague, Czech Republic): ''

Thank you very much for your agreement to give an interview to the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum. The Association for International Affairs has been involved in various projects in the so-called Visegrád countries (V4), given that there is still such a notion as Visegrád countries. Which current projects in this area have you been implementing?

The Association for International Affairs has recently had a strong V4 aspect in its activities. Last year we organised a survey among V4 foreign policy experts, which enabled us to gather the data of more than four hundred people responding to the questionnaire. We tried to identify key policy issues that the people see within the V4 region and also to observe what they considered the current main foreign policy challenges in this regard. It turns out that issues - such as security, and energy security in particular, and migration - are on the top of the agenda. And now we intend to follow up on this project next year - with a specific focus on European policy, which we thought should be very interesting given the current standing of the V4 within the European Union as a sort of a pressure bloc.

Another project that we have been involved in this year is led by our Moldovan partners and is focusing on the communication of the accession process to the European Union and gathering some of the best practices by the V4 countries - prior to their accession to the European Union in relation to Moldovans, Georgians and Ukrainians signing the association agreements and joining the free trade areas. And this is another project with a strong V4 aspect, in which we think we can somehow gather the “know-how” that the V4 has and transfer it further for some use.

The most long-standing project of the Association for International Affairs has been the Prague Student Summit, which is launching its 22nd year and that's based on the models of various international organisations with the students from all around the country. But these are not only the participants from the Czech Republic: We have lately had students from other V4 countries. One of the sessions has always been a simulation of a V4 session. This year, we transformed that to an OSCE simulation, which will gather thirty international students, including those from the V4 countries, to go and discuss the problems that are relevant for the region. That’s roughly what we have been doing in this regard and we definitely intend to develop those projects further.

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