On 30 September, former Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer party won 22.9 percent of the vote in the parliamentary election, giving it the right to try to assemble a governing coalition of the six remaining parties to take seats on the National Council. If Smeru succeeds, it could lead to a dramatic change in Bratislava’s support for Ukraine.
In the run-up to the vote, Fico promised that he would “not send a single bullet to Ukraine” if he won the election.
Fico’s predecessors sent up to $700 million in direct military aid to Ukraine in the first 19 months of full-scale war. Mathieu Droin, a visiting fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, told Newsweek:
“Slovakia has been leading by example when it comes to transferring its Soviet legacy equipment to Ukraine.”
Slovakia started providing military assistance to Ukraine from the first days of the war in February 2022. 120-mm artillery ammunition, anti-tank missiles and S-300 surface-to-air missile systems were sent to Ukraine. This spring, Bratislava transferred 13 Mig-29 aircraft to Kyiv. In exchange, Washington promised to help rearm Slovakia with Western arms worth about $1 billion, with Slovakia itself paying only $340 million.
However, even if Fico and his Smer party are able to put together a parliamentary coalition, changes in Slovak support for Ukraine are likely to be rhetorical rather than material. Mathieu Droin explained:
“The fact is that Slovakia has already largely exhausted its capacity to provide materiel to Ukraine from its pre-war stocks and so when Fico says that Slovakia will stop providing military support to Ukraine, it really does not herald a change from what we would have seen happen materially even under a more Ukraine-friendly government in Bratislava.”
Slovakia has a similar situation with Poland. At the beginning of the war, Poland sent Ukraine more than 300 domestically produced tanks and several Soviet-era Mig-29s, and now it needs to rebuild its own military stocks.
On 20 September, in an interview on national television ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for 15 October, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki infamously said:
“We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons.”
However, rising tensions between Ukraine and a growing number of Western political parties represent a worrying trend, although it is unlikely to have a direct impact on the course of hostilities. Droin said:
“For months, Hungary was the only real outlier when it came to open support for Ukraine, which meant it was isolated. But we do see that elsewhere in central Europe there is a worrying politicization of the issue of support for Ukraine.”
This trend is not only visible in Europe. Last week in Washington, the agreement reached by congressional leaders to avoid a government shutdown did not include an additional $24 billion in aid to Ukraine. Droin noted:
“In the US we are seeing support for Ukraine being turned into a political debate. In comparison to what is happening in Washington and Warsaw, political developments in Bratislava are relatively less important.”
