Fico's Blind Spot
Russia has already sabotaged a defense plant on Slovak soil, and the PM still won't say the word Russia
Slovak MP Juraj Krúpa used his own column this week to draw a line connecting incidents most European readers have been tracking separately: sabotage attempts against critical infrastructure in Lithuania, Poland, and Denmark, the attack on drone manufacturer Skyeton's plant in eastern Slovakia, and the attempted sabotage of a military-linked facility in Leipzig.
Laid out together, Krúpa argues, these stop looking like isolated criminal incidents and start looking like exactly what they are: a sustained Russian hybrid campaign against Europe's energy, transport, and defense infrastructure, aimed at destabilizing the continent and eroding collective security one deniable act at a time.
His sharper point, though, is aimed closer to home. Krúpa accuses Prime Minister Robert Fico of minimizing the Russian threat and echoing Kremlin talking points instead of responding to sabotage the way an EU and NATO member state normally would, a posture he says makes Slovakia an unreliable ally and, not incidentally, helps Russia claw its way back out of international isolation.
It is worth being blunt about what that criticism actually describes: the Prime Minister who avoids naming the country behind an attack on his own soil, specifically to keep from irritating that country, is not managing diplomacy.
Fico is opting out of the basic job description of leading a state under alliance obligations, which is to defend that state's security first and worry about Moscow's feelings a distant second.
The Skyeton case makes this concrete rather than abstract. Slovak and German authorities disrupted a plot to burn down the Slovak factory of a Ukrainian drone maker, arresting a Ukrainian and two Latvian nationals allegedly acting on someone else's orders, while a front group calling itself "peace activists" claimed responsibility and Western intelligence sources described it as part of a wider Russian pattern of recruiting local intermediaries to hit European weapons manufacturers and test how alliance states respond.
That is not a hypothetical scenario for Slovakia to worry about in the abstract. It already happened inside Slovak borders, against a company doing exactly the kind of work Fico's own government has spent two years arguing Europe shouldn't be doing for Ukraine.
Compare that with how Slovakia's neighbors have handled the same category of incident this year.
Czechia summoned Russia's ambassador over the Leipzig drone scare, rejected her explanation that the accusations were themselves a provocation, and announced reciprocal restrictions on Russian diplomatic staff within days.
Lithuania treated fake funeral wreaths left outside a defense contractor's office as a serious enough national-security matter to make an arrest and name the likely source publicly within hours.
Poland opened a foreign-intelligence and terrorism investigation, carrying a potential life sentence, within a day of an arson attack on a drone manufacturer supplying its own army.
None of these governments needed absolute proof of a Kremlin fingerprint before they were willing to say the word Russia out loud, while Fico's government had an actual attack on Slovak soil and still managed to say less than any of them.
That gap matters beyond Slovakia's own borders. Krúpa's underlying warning, that silence doesn't just fail to solve the problem but actively invites more of it, is not a rhetorical flourish.
A hybrid campaign built around plausible deniability succeeds precisely by testing which targets generate a real response and which ones don't, and a government that treats an attack on its own defense industry as something better left uncommented on is handing Moscow exactly the data point it's looking for.
The lesson Slovakia's silence teaches Russia it's that Bratislava is available, and every incident that passes without a name attached to it makes the next one a little cheaper to attempt.