A lone outlier and rare voice of dissent to come out of the generally staunchly pro-Ukraine central and eastern European countries has been Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. He has stirred the pot again and caused outrage among fellow government officials after penning an op-ed this week wherein he slammed the West for getting Ukraine wrong all along.
What’s more is that the op-ed published by Slovak newspaper Pravda.sk on Tuesday was issued at the very moment President Zelensky has been touring nearby Baltic countries while urging more weapons and support as the “arms warehouses are empty”, supposedly. Fico is a member of the left Smer party in Slovakia and has pointed out that NATO leaders and the US have “repeatedly erred in assessing” the real state of the war.
He articulated that it’s largely the false “black-and-white vision” of the war, a simplistic narrative “desired in Washington or Brussels,” which has resulted in blunder after blunder, and greater suffering for all during an unnecessarily protracted conflict. Fico described the now proxy war as a “futile waste of human resources and money” that the Western allies got painfully wrong.
