Digest of news from Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland, March 23 - March 29, 2026
Slovakia
Key news to follow:
1. Slovak police open investigation against Fico on suspicion of high treason
2. New ultimatum to Brussels: blocking the 20th sanctions package and revising Slovakia's position on Ukrainian EU membership
Analysis:
On 27 March, Slovak police confirmed the opening of a criminal investigation against Prime Minister Robert Fico. The trigger was a formal complaint filed by Branislav Grőling, leader of the liberal Freedom and Solidarity party (SAS), which was subsequently joined by more than 13,000 citizens. The opposition characterises Fico's decision to halt emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine (issued in late February on the grounds that Druzhba oil transit had not been restored) as high treason, abuse of power, and a crime against humanity. Police stated that the investigation is at its initial stage, focused on verifying whether the facts presented correspond to the elements of a criminal offence. Worth noting is that Ukraine's grid operator Ukrenergo assessed at the time that the halt had no meaningful impact on the country's unified energy system – a detail that complicates Fico's framing of the move as a proportionate response to an energy emergency.
On 29 March, Bratislava's rhetoric escalated further. In a video address, Fico publicly accused the European Commission of applying double standards – claiming that Brussels sends Slovakia "threatening letters" for measures to protect its domestic fuel market while forwarding Ukraine "letters full of love and understanding." He explicitly threatened to block the 20th sanctions package against Russia should the Commission fail to pressure Kyiv into restoring Druzhba transit. More significantly, he also put Slovakia's support for Ukrainian EU accession on the table – a threshold that, until recently, he had avoided crossing publicly.
The internal logic of this escalation is consistent: Fico systematically expands the list of leverage instruments he places before his domestic audience, raising the stakes with each iteration. At the same time, the structural cost of open confrontation with Brussels remains considerably higher for Bratislava than for Budapest – and Fico is well aware of this asymmetry. The treason investigation, meanwhile, poses less of an immediate legal risk than a reputational one: IESS suggests that it fixes in public consciousness the image of the PM whose decisions are treated by a significant portion of his own citizenry as acts against the national interest.
Czech Republic
Key news to follow:
1. The Pardubice attack: the "Earthquake Faction" trail points toward Moscow
2. Molotov cocktails thrown at the Russian House in Prague – new incident against the backdrop of mounting security turbulence
Analysis:
A detailed analysis of the 20 March attack at the LPP Holding facility in Pardubice, published on 24 March, yields conclusions that reach well beyond the criminal record.
LPP Holding, a manufacturer of drones and rockets, had been in preliminary discussions with Israel's Elbit Systems about potential cooperation, but those talks had not produced any confirmed contracts. What was confirmed, however, was that the company was producing Divoká svině UAVs for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, financed by the volunteer initiative Darek pro Putina ("A Gift for Putin"). The fire also damaged facilities belonging to the Ukrainian company Archer, which manufactures thermal imaging systems for the UAF.
Responsibility was claimed by a group calling itself The Earthquake Faction, previously entirely unknown, via an email sent to a journalist at Aktualne.cz. The group's page on X had been created just one day before the attack. Several features of the incident immediately struck experts as incongruous: the Czech public is predominantly pro-Israeli; the Gaza conflict has not been in a hot phase for over three years; and, crucially, the former head of Czech military intelligence, Andor Šandor, publicly noted that such groups typically accumulate a history of activists` actions before turning to direct action. He stated he could not recall a case of a group forming immediately prior to a terrorist act. An additional detail captured on the published footage: before setting the fire, the attackers systematically collected technical documentation – information of no conceivable interest to pro-Palestinian radicals, but of obvious interest to Russian intelligence. The Russian false-flag operation hypothesis is one of four lines of inquiry being pursued by Czech police, and one of the leading ones.
The political fallout for Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is mounting on several fronts simultaneously. His ANO party retains a stable rating of 34.2% (STEM poll, 22 March), while coalition partner SPD stands at 7.1% and the "Motorists" risk failing to enter parliament altogether. Babiš maintained this support by packing the revised state budget with social initiatives from his campaign platform – but at the cost of significant cuts to defence and security spending. The Pardubice attack exposed that gap: following an emergency session of the National Security Council, Babiš called on Czech defence companies to strengthen their own security at their own expense, as state funds are no longer available. The national security threat level was left unchanged at B – the second of four tiers, formally signalling the absence of serious threats.
The reversal on the foreign agents bill is equally telling. Until 22 March, the bill, modelled partly on Russian legislation, and linked by press reports to Babiš's adviser Natali Vagatova (Deputy head of the openly pro-Kremlin party Tricolor), appeared to be a government priority. On 23 March, the government announced it had no intention of proceeding with the legislation. Whether this reversal is directly connected to an attack whose most probable sponsor is Moscow remains, for now, an open question.
The second Czech story of the week is shorter but not without significance. In the night of 26–27 March, an unidentified individual threw several Molotov cocktails at the building of the Russian House on Na Zátorce street in Prague 6, managed by the Russian state agency Rossotrudnichestvo – placed on the EU sanctions list in 2022 for distributing pro-Kremlin propaganda. The attacker fled the scene. We admit that incident didn`t cause major damage but adds another layer to a week in which Russian-linked targets and Russian-linked suspects appeared with unusual frequency on Czech soil.
Poland
Key news to follow:
1. Warsaw plans an electronic barrier on the Ukrainian border – security logic or an ambiguous signal?
2. "Polexit" as a mirror: what Poland's EU debate reveals about the state of its society, – Agnieszka Lichnerowicz
Analysis:
On 30 March, Polish media RMF24 reported that Warsaw is preparing to construct a sophisticated electronic monitoring system along the Polish-Ukrainian border, covering the area of responsibility of the Nadbużański Border Guard district. The project, estimated at approximately 450 million zloty, envisages underground seismic sensors, fibre-optic data cables, power infrastructure, and poles equipped with day and thermal-vision cameras for round-the-clock surveillance, all feeding directly into a monitoring centre at the unit headquarters. The official justification explicitly references the "threat arising from Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine." Functionally, the barrier is oriented toward hybrid threat detection and illegal border crossing and not toward Ukraine as such. However, the decision to pursue it separately from the EU's SAFE programme – whose financing was blocked by a presidential veto from Karol Nawrocki – adds a layer of institutional complexity and will require careful diplomatic signalling toward Kyiv.
The second Polish story this week is structural rather than operational in nature. An analysis published on 24 March by Nova Polshcha maps the anatomy of Poland's "Polexit" debate – a conversation that refuses to vacate the public space despite appearing, at first glance, to have little demographic foundation. The January 2026 CBOS survey records 82% of Poles in favour of remaining in the EU and 14% against – a decline of 10 percentage points from the record-high 92% registered at the outset of Russia's full-scale invasion, which analysts consider a temporary wartime anomaly rather than a baseline. Other polling agencies (Pollster, IBRIS) suggest EU opponents may number between one-fifth and one-quarter of the population. Among right-wing voters specifically, EU supporters now constitute only two-thirds of the electorate. The only party that openly advocates withdrawal is Grzegorz Braun's Confederation of the Polish Crown; PiS, whose candidate for prime minister Przemysław Czarnek has previously threatened a referendum if Brussels fails to heed Warsaw, stops short of a formal Polexit platform for as long as Jarosław Kaczyński remains party leader. Analyst Wojciech Szacki of Polityka Insight warns, however, that the trajectory of PiS's EU rhetoric makes a shift toward exit slogans likely – particularly after Kaczyński's eventual departure, which could split the party into factions with divergent European orientations.
The deeper structural risk, as identified by analysts, lies in the nature of Polish pro-EU sentiment itself: it is predominantly pragmatic, anchored in the tangible benefits of open borders, labour mobility, and EU structural funds. When Poland ceases to be a net recipient of the EU budget – a transition that is already underway regardless of the pace of Ukrainian accession – this argument will lose much of its persuasive force. The British precedent demonstrated that systematic delegitimisation of the EU, combined with unresolved social grievances, can produce a majority for exit with startling speed. IESS reads the Nawrocki veto on SAFE as a preview of how institutional friction, rather than outright Euroscepticism, can erode practical European solidarity: and as a warning that Poland's pro-Atlantic consensus rests on a more fragile social foundation than its defence spending figures might suggest.