Does shooting of Slovak leader heighten war risk?

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Europe’s toughest opponent of military backing for Ukraine, was shot multiple times May 15 by an as yet unidentified assailant. He was transported by helicopter to a trauma center at Banska Bystrica, where he is fighting for his life. His condition is not known.

Few details have been published about the would-be assassin, who was captured after the incident. Reportedly a 71-year-old man used a legally-owned weapon. The shooting took place at a private government off-site meeting in Handlova, and it is not known how the gunman learned of and gained access to the closed event. 

It is the first shooting of a European head of government since the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986.

After two previous terms as prime minister Fico returned to office in 2023, in a coalition among his Direction-Social Democracy party and two other parties. He opposed shipping Western arms to Ukraine through Slovak territory and has opposed the provision of Western weapons to Ukraine. Instead, Fico said in a September 2023 interview, “Why don’t we force the warring parties, use the weight of the EU and the US to make them sit down and find some sort of compromise that would guarantee security for Ukraine?”

The Czech Republic may follow Slovakia’s opposition to the Ukraine war after next year’s parliamentary election. Andrej Babis’ ANO party has a decisive lead in voter polls. Along with Hungary, Slovakia stands to form a block with Czechia and Serbia in opposition to US and European Commission support for Ukraine.

The shooting recalls the July 31, 1914, assassination of French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, his country’s leading opponent of war after the murder of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo the previous month. He was shot at a Paris café by an alleged lone gunman.

So far, we have only questions about the shooting of Fico and no answers. But the strategic background to Ukraine’s military position is dire, the country’s military itself reports, as undermanned and exhausted Ukrainian units succumb to the relentless pounding of Russian air attacks and artillery.

It isn’t clear what Russia has in mind as it pursues a reconnaissance in force around Kharkov, but the salient facts are not in dispute. NATO countries do not have enough shells and air defense missiles, and Ukraine does not have sufficient manpower, to push back Russia’s crawling offensive.

The Biden Administration won’t sit on its hands while the most important military conflict since Vietnam goes pear-shaped. In some ways Ukraine is more important than Vietnam although no American body bags are coming home.

Two years ago, the West believed that its advanced weaponry would defeat the Russian army and that sanctions would crush the Russian economy. Instead, the Westfaces a Russia supplied by China via a dozen other countries, a revitalized Russian military that has displayed ingenuity in adapting to the battlefield and, worst of all, the humiliation of a shriveled defense industrial base that cannot produce enough weapons to match Russian output.

The Biden Administration will look to the November elections, fearing the effect of a Ukrainian defeat at the polls, but its determination to prevent a Russian victory has deeper motivations: At stake is the credibility of American leadership in Europe and around the world.

The US and its allies have many options, none of them salubrious. One is to help Ukraine attack major targets inside Russia, a frequent theme of American hawks. Another is to deploy Western troops in Ukraine directly or, as some have proposed, through a mercenary force of trained Western pilots flying Western aircraft against the Russians.

The Biden Administration has declined to take such steps, for the obvious reason that they might lead to a wider war. That was before Russia appeared close to victory. The attempted assassination of a determined, credible and duly elected East European leader might prove to be the writing on the wall.