LADOMIROVA, Slovakia — When Ukraine discovered civilian mass
graves in an area recaptured from Russian troops, Russia’s ambassador in
neighboring Slovakia countered with his own discovery.
اضافة اعلان
The mayor of a remote
Slovak village, as the ambassador announced last September, had bulldozed
Russian graves from World War I. Ambassador Igor Bratchikov demanded that the
Slovak government, a robust supporter of Ukraine, take action to punish the
“blasphemous act.”
The Slovak police responded
swiftly, dismissing the ambassador’s claims as a “hoax,” but his fabrication
took flight, amplified by vociferous pro-Russian groups in Slovakia and news
outlets notorious for recycling Russian propaganda.
Vladislav Cuper, the former mayor of
Ladomirova, at his home in the village in Ladomirova.
A month later, the mayor of
the village, Vladislav Cuper, lost an election to a rival candidate from a
populist party opposed to helping Ukraine.
Today, the same forces that
helped unseat Cuper have mobilized for a general election in Slovakia on Sept.
30 with much bigger stakes.
The vote will not only
decide who governs a small Central European nation with fewer than 6 million
people but will also indicate whether opposition to helping Ukraine, a position
now mostly confined to the political fringes across Europe, could take hold in
the mainstream.
The front-runner, according
to opinion polls, is a party headed by Robert Fico, a pugnacious former prime
minister who has vowed to halt Slovak arms deliveries to Ukraine, denounced
sanctions against Russia and railed against NATO, despite his country’s membership
in the alliance.
A strong showing in the
election by Fico and far-right parties hostile to the government in Kyiv would
likely turn one of Ukraine’s most stalwart backers — Slovakia was the first
country to send it air-defense missiles and fighter jets — into a neutral bystander
more sympathetic to Moscow. It would also end the isolation of Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orban as the only leader in the European Union and NATO
speaking out strongly against helping Ukraine.
“Russia is rejoicing,”
Rastislav Kacer, a former foreign minister and outspoken supporter of Ukraine,
said in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. “Slovakia is a great success story for
its propaganda. It has worked hard and very successfully to exploit my country
as a wedge to divide Europe.”
Thanks to widespread public
discontent with the infighting between pro-Western Slovak politicians who came
to power in 2020, and deep pools of genuine pro-Russian sentiment dating back
to the 19th century, Russia has been pushing on an open door.
A survey of public opinion
across Eastern and Central Europe in March by Globsec, a Bratislava-based
research group, found that only 40% of Slovaks blame Russia for the war in
Ukraine, while 51% believe that either Ukraine or the West is “primarily responsible.”
In Poland, 85% blame Russia. In the Czech Republic, 71% think Russia is
responsible.
Daniel Milo, director of an
Interior Ministry department aimed at countering disinformation and other
nonmilitary threats, acknowledged that “there is fertile ground here for
pro-Russian sentiment.” But he added that genuine sympathy rooted in history had
been exploited by Russia and its local helpers to sow division and sour public
opinion on Ukraine.
Children climbing on Soviet and German tanks at
a World War II monument outside Ladomirova, Slovakia, on Aug. 28, 2023.
Those helpers include
Hlavne Spravy, a popular anti-American news site, and a bikers group called
Brat za Brata, or Brother for Brother, which is affiliated with the
Kremlin-sponsored Night Wolves motorcycle gang in Russia.
A freelance writer for
Hlavne Spravy, Bohus Garbar, was convicted of espionage this year after being
caught on camera taking money from Russia’s military attaché, who has since
been expelled.
Brat za Brata, which has a
large following on social media and close ties to the Russian embassy, has
meanwhile worked to intimidate Russia’s critics.
Peter Kalmus, a 70-year-old
Slovak artist, said he was beaten up by members of the biker group last month
after he defaced a Soviet war memorial in the eastern city of Kosice to protest
Russian atrocities in Ukraine. In March, the bikers reduced to pandemonium a
government-sponsored public debate about the war in a town near the Ukrainian
border attended by Kacer, who was then still a minister. Fiercely pro-Russian
protesters bused in by the bikers, recalled Kacer, “jumped on the stage
screaming and spitting at us.”
Many Slovaks, said Grigorij
Meseznikov, the Russian-born president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a
Bratislava research group, “have an invented romantic vision of Russia in their
heads that does not really exist” and are easily swayed by “lies and
propaganda” about the West.
That, he added, has made
the country vulnerable to efforts by Moscow to rally pro-Russian sentiment in
the hope of undermining European unity over Ukraine. Slovakia is a small
country, Meseznikov said, but “if you take even a small brick out of a wall it
can crumble.”
That is certainly the hope of
Lubos Blaha, a former member of a heavy metal band and the author of books on
Lenin and Che Guevara who is now the deputy leader of Fico’s surging political
party, SMER. He is also one of Slovakia’s loudest and most influential
Kremlin-friendly voices on social media and regularly denounces his country’s
liberal female president, Zuzana Caputova, as a “fascist” and pro-Ukrainian
ministers as “American puppets.”
“The mood in Europe is
changing,” Blaha said in an interview, describing the conflict in Ukraine as “a
war of the American empire against the Russian empire” that cannot be won
because Russia is a nuclear power.
Insisting he was “not
pro-Russia, just pro my country’s national interests,” Blaha predicted that
countries hostile to arming Ukraine would soon “be in the majority while
supporters of Ukraine will be in a small minority,” especially if Donald Trump
wins the next presidential election in the United States.
The Church of St. Michael the Archangel in
Ladomirova, Slovakia, on Aug. 28, 2023.
In the run-up to Slovakia’s
own election, the usually placid country has been swamped by heated accusations
on all sides of foreign interference. Fico has accused NATO of meddling in the
campaign, while his foes have pointed a finger at Russia.
Describing Fico’s SMER
party as a “Trojan horse” for Russia, Jaroslav Nad, a former defense minister
who led a push to send arms to Ukraine, claimed this summer that, according to
intelligence reports, a Slovak citizen he didn’t identify had visited Russia
“to receive financial resources to benefit SMER.” But, citing confidentiality,
he produced no evidence, and his claim has been widely dismissed as a
pre-election smear.
Still, the Russian
ambassador’s fabricated story of desecrated war graves highlighted Russia’s
skill at fishing in Slovakia’s troubled waters. It also provided what Milo, the
interior ministry official, called “a very rare smoking gun” directly implicating
Moscow in scripting a fake scandal. “They usually act more cleverly and try not
to get caught red-handed,” he said.
During a visit last week to
the still-intact graveyard in Ladomirova, Cuper said that in his view Russia
did not care who won the mayoral vote there, but had spotted a good opportunity
“to distract attention from mass graves in Ukraine” and “present itself as a
victim.”
When the ambassador visited
Ladomirova, he met with Cuper’s bitter rival, a former mayor whom Cuper had
accused of embezzling village funds and who was convicted of fraud in 2019. The
former mayor’s wife, Olga Bojcikova, who declined to be interviewed, was at the
time running against Cuper, who was backed by pro-Ukrainian parties, in the
local election last October. She won.
The ambassador’s story of
“razed” Russian graves, though debunked by the police, was, Cuper recalled,
“blown out of all proportion” by Kremlin-friendly Slovaks, particularly the
Brat za Brata bikers.
The bikers posted
incendiary statements on Facebook denouncing the mayor’s “blasphemous act” and
rallied its members to respond. This set off calls for Cuper to be “executed,”
“buried alive,” and “flogged like a dog.”
Slovakia’s prosecutor
general, Maros Zilinka, who has a long history of sympathy for Russia and
hostility to the United States, added fuel to the fire by announcing that the
mayor could be liable for criminal prosecution for a “morally reprehensible
act” that needed to be investigated.
Cuper said he never touched
the graves but had removed stone border markers because they were falling
apart. Nor did he touch a notice board put up as part of renovation work
financed by Russia in 2014: It falsely described the cemetery as the resting place
of 270 Russian war dead. The cemetery contains the unidentified bodies of
soldiers from various countries, including Russia, killed in a World War I
battle.
The ambassador’s story, he
said, was “entirely untrue” but still “created a national uproar.”
Read more Odd and Bizarre
Jordan News