On September 30, the Smer party of former Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico won a 22.9 percent plurality of the popular vote in parliamentary elections, giving the populist movement the right to attempt to assemble a governing coalition from among the six remaining parties slated to take up seats in the National Council. If Smer succeeds, it could bring about a cardinal shift in Bratislava's support for Ukraine.
"If Smer enters government, we will not send a single round of ammunition to Ukraine," Fico promised in the run-up to the vote.
Fico's rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the policies of the openly Kyiv-friendly outgoing coalition, which sent upwards of $700 million of direct military aid to Ukraine over the first 19 months of the full-scale war.
"Slovakia has been leading by example when it comes to transferring its Soviet legacy equipment to Ukraine," Mathieu Droin, a visiting fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, told Newsweek.
Starting in the days immediately following Russia's open invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Slovakia began sending military aid that included 120mm artillery ammunition, anti-tank missiles, and an S-300 air defense system. In April 2023, Bratislava completed the transfer of 13 Mig-29 aircraft to Kyiv. In exchange, the United States pledged to help rearm Slovakia with Western-made weaponry worth an estimated $1 billion, with Slovakia itself footing only $340 million of the bill.
However, even if Fico and his Smer party prove capable of assembling a parliamentary coalition, the change in Slovak support for Ukraine is likely to be more rhetorical than material.
"The fact is that Slovakia has already largely exhausted its capacity to provide materiel to Ukraine from its pre-war stocks," Droin explained, "and so when Fico says that Slovakia will stop providing military support to Ukraine, it really does not herald a change from what we would have seen happen materially even under a more Ukraine-friendly government in Bratislava."
Slovakia finds itself in a situation similar to that of Poland, which sent Ukraine materiel including over 300 domestically produced tanks along with a handful of Soviet-era Mig-29s earlier in the war and now finds itself in the position of choosing to prioritize the reconstitution of its own arsenal.
On September 20, in an interview given to domestic television in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for October 15, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki infamously said that, "We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons."
But while the rise in tensions between Ukraine and a growing number of Western political parties is unlikely to have an immediate effect on the battlefield, it nevertheless represents a worrying trend.
"For months, Hungary was the only real outlier when it came to open support for Ukraine, which meant it was isolated," Droin said. "But we do see that elsewhere in central Europe there is a worrying politicization of the issue of support for Ukraine."
The tendency is not only evident in Europe. Last week in Washington, the deal reached by Congressional leaders to avoid a government shutdown left out a proposed $24 billion in additional aid to Ukraine.
"In the U.S. we are seeing support for Ukraine being turned into a political debate," Droin noted. "In comparison to what is happening in Washington and Warsaw, political developments in Bratislava are relatively less important."
