ROB CAMERON

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent millions fleeing across the country’s western borders – including to Slovakia. Some were passing through, on their way to stay with friends and family further west, but many had nowhere to go – and no idea when they would be able to go home. And among the great tide of exhausted and disoriented people were thousands of foreign students.

Russian military equipment captured by the Ukrainian armed forces has gone on display in the Czech capital, Prague. “Russian propaganda likes to scare people that their tanks can reach Prague, Berlin or Paris. Ukrainians demonstrate – only in the form of scrap,” Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Denys Monastyrsky told the BBC.

Petr Pavel was an unlikely choice for president of a country which has shied away from militarism. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed everything. Pavel – once head of the Czech armed forces and number two at NATO – defeated former PM Andrej Babiš by a clear margin in January 2023, and gave his first international TV interview to the BBC.

A Czech primary school teacher is due to face trial for spreading Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine to her pupils. Martina Bednarova told children last April there was “no war” in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. On the contrary, she claimed, Ukrainian soldiers were murdering the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbas.

Peter Pellegrini has been elected president of Slovakia. A former prime minister, Mr Pellegrini is an ally of Prime Minister Robert Fico, and shares the PM’s opposition to arming Ukraine. Mr Pellegrini’s campaign echoed some of Fico’s Moscow-friendly rhetoric, vowing after his victory “to ensure that Slovakia remains on the side of peace and not on the side of war”.

Robert Fico might have promised to send “not one more round of ammunition” to Ukraine, but he wasn’t speaking for all Slovaks. When the government cut off state-supplied military aid, citizens banded together, raising €1m for artillery shells within 48 hours. They included Otto Simko, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor and veteran of the Slovak National Uprising.

Robert Fico describes himself as a leftist and a social democrat. But his Smer party is in government with the far-right, and his language is increasingly vitriolic and nationalist. He’s blamed the assassination attempt of May 2024 on the liberal opposition as well as his pro-peace stance, and says Vladimir Putin has been ‘wrongly demonised’ by the west.

Slovakia’s populist prime minister, Robert Fico, has claimed the opposition is planning a “Maidan”-style coup, referring to the popular uprising that toppled Ukraine‘s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Fico, who survived an assassination attempt last May, quoted from what he said was a classified report ahead of a motion of no-confidence.