"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
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"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
Slovakia's prime minister, Robert Fico, argued on Saturday that having failed to defeat Moscow through the war in Ukraine, a section of the Western political class is now angling for a direct clash between NATO and Russia.
Fico, who has held office for years and maintained cordial ties with Moscow while refusing to arm Kyiv, said earlier in the week that the continent had never been closer to a full-scale war spilling out of the Ukraine conflict.
In a message posted to social media, he described the moment in stark terms: "We face a mortal danger", as the West continues to "pour fuel on the fire" through backing for Ukraine — support he judged to have achieved nothing.
"The failure of the strategy to destroy Russia through the war in Ukraine has led some Western politicians to believe that if the goal cannot be achieved through the Ukrainian army and full support for it, then every effort must be made to trigger a conflict between NATO and Russia," Fico said in the video.
The fighting, he insisted, belongs neither to Slovakia nor to the alliance. "Certain war hawks within NATO are trying, at any cost, to turn this war into a conflict between Russia and NATO," he said.
Days earlier, Fico cautioned that a single drone crossing a border could trigger NATO's mutual-defense provision, and said he intends to keep Slovakia — an alliance member sharing a frontier with Ukraine — out of any armed confrontation.
Manufacturing a justification for war is not difficult, he said on Saturday, repeating that Slovak troops will not be deployed on the strength of an invented one.
Other European capitals are drawing the opposite conclusion. French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that Moscow is stepping up hybrid operations against Europe, pointing to an attempted drone strike at Leipzig airport in August — an incident Berlin has attributed to Russia — as a sign of how Russian aggression is shifting.
Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, told the public on Thursday that intelligence services, whom he did not name, expect Russia to mount hybrid drone and missile attacks on states that support Ukraine.
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