On April 27, Bloomberg called attention to yet another potential threat to the U.S./NATO war against Russia: Robert Fico, the former prime minister of Slovakia. Fico’s party is running in national elections and is leading in the polls. He has already told the envoys from leading NATO member countries that, should he regain power, he would end the nation’s arms deliveries to Ukraine and put a brake on some plans to introduce more sanctions on Russia.
“I don’t want to supply deadly weapons to Ukraine just for the sake of a good image among Western countries,” Fico said at his party’s headquarters in Bratislava on April 25. “We have the right to have our own opinion.” Fico’s potential comeback has been helped by the national division over Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. He has criticized the government and its pro-U.S. “nodding” and also its handling of a cost-of-living crisis.
This week, Fico met with ambassadors of the U.S., U.K. and EU to lay out his foreign policy goals. He told them that if he is back in office, Slovakia would not support Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership because that “biggest nonsense” would make the conflict global, he said. “Taking Ukraine into NATO would mean the beginning of World War III and that’s why we have a serious problem with it,” Fico insisted. Peace talks should take place now before more lives are lost and also as Ukraine could lock in gains, he said. “Tomorrow’s peace talks could result in Ukraine getting much more than in six months.”
U.S. Ambassador to Slovakia Gautam Rana had a hysteria fit. “Such proposals come directly from Putin’s mouth and there is nothing neutral about them,” Rana said in a statement posted to the Embassy’s Facebook page after the meeting. “Aligning with Putin is appeasement, no different than the appeasement offered to Hitler. It did not work with Hitler then, and it will not work with Putin today.” (https://www.facebook.com/USEmbassySlovakia/posts/547201897597441/)
Fico wasn’t troubled by the rebuke, saying it was clear from the meeting with the envoys this week that Western powers want to continue supporting Ukraine in the war and weapons deliveries, while he is insisting on peace. “You cannot scold a nation for having a certain opinion,” he said, dismissing the idea that he could be isolated within the EU along with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. “I’m not for Putin, I am for peace,” he said. “I hope the West has enough sense to not go into an open war with the Russian Federation.”
