Garvan Walshe is a former National and International Security Policy Adviser to the Conservative Party.
Having to shell one of your own cities because your enemy has sent irregulars in to capture it has to have been embarrassing for Putin: Russians bombing Russians invading Russia was how several wags put it on social media.
Antony Blinken crowing that Russia told us it had the second-best army in the world-but now we know that has only the second-best army in Ukraine – must have stung.
Even the latest dambuster operation has inundated as much Russian-occupied territory as Ukrainian. The capture of the Kharkhova dam was one of the most ominous signs of Russia’s initial success in February 2022. Its destruction in retreat shows how far below expectations Russia’s military has performed.
Proof, if any more were needed, that Putin is a KGB man not a soldier. His KGB operations are alive and well. Marine Le Pen, called to testify into a French inquiry into Russian interference, protested that she had always supported Putin, and that her support had nothing to do with the cheap loan her party got from a bank owned by a Russian defence contractor. It’s an argument, I suppose – but a strange one for a French nationalist. Less Rassamblement National, more Russie National.
The next French election isn’t due until 2027, and Trump is in no end of legal trouble in the US. Two countries closer to home are more vulnerable, however. One’s national poet saw its language as an expression of pan-slavic brotherhood against the imperial might of the Habsburg Empire. The other has the rare distinction of owing its independence to Russian troops.
The first, Slovakia, is due to have an election in the autumn after its centre-right coalition collapsed amidst spectacular personal infighting among its components who disagreed little on substance. The SMER party, led by Robert Fico (once Prime Minister, but ousted after Jan Kuciak, a journalist investigating corruption, was murdered) again tops the polls. Second is HLAS, led by Peter Pellegrini, which split from SMER, but which could be a suitable coalition partner for his former boss.
Fico is campaigning on a pro-Russian platform, promising to end Slovakia’s support for Ukraine. Pellegrini is hedging his bets, but also draws his support from mostly older people with sympathy for Russia. Dominika Hajdu, who has conducted extensive polling for the Slovak think tank GLOBSEC, explained that even in March 2022, “25 per cent of the people perceived Putin positively”.
Added to genuine pro-Russian feeling, Hajdu says, are those afraid of provoking Russia. That part of the population doesn’t feel NATO will protect them, or devote much thought to the fact that Ukraine’s defeat would mean Russian troops on Slovakia’s border.
And though the new centre-liberal and pro-NATO Progressive Slovakia party, led by the impressive Michal Simecka, is also doing well, its vote base is confined to the major cities of this socially conservative Catholic country.
The centre-right is also pro-Ukraine, but its splits run the risk that most of it won’t reach the threshold to enter parliament. It would be surprising if Russia weren’t fomenting them. Their weakness increases the risk that Fico, despite officially being a man of the left, could assemble a pro-Russian coalition together with the extreme right. Any similarity to Soviet bond-villains SMERSH is surely coincidental.
In Bulgaria, a series of close elections made stable government difficult. Ther,e the dodgy strongman came from the centre right, in the bald, portly form of Boyko Borissov, looking every bit the retired nightclub bouncer he used to be.
His GERB party lost to a Slovak-style everybody-but coalition, led by Kiril Petkov after four inconclusive elections. But that coalition fell after the war when a pro-Russian populist party withdrew, leaving a caretaker government unable to assert its independence against a pro-Russian president and mafia-linked chief prosecutor.
Another close election this April had Borissov’s GERB tied with Petkov’s grouping. Had it been 2016, one might have imagined Borissov governing by deals with the Turkish minority party and pro-Russian far right (however inconsistent its policies might have be), but the war has made such an alignment impossible.
The odds of yet another election seemed high until Bulgaria’s EU commissioner, Maya Gabriel, was recalled. Petkov’s objection was to Borissov as Prime Minister rather than tp the GERB party, and a rotation deal was hammered out – Petkov to be Prime Minister for nine months, followed by Gabriel.
It was as this deal was forming that things began to get murky. A bomb attack, widely thought to be staged, targeted the country’s chief prosecutor. The security services began to trump up a “treason” investigation against a local head of the European Council for Foreign relations, Vessela Tcherneva, a former foreign policy adviser to Petkov.
The parliament erupted in a fistfight. There were not enough opposition to stop the government being sworn in on Tuesday, though the (pro-Russian) president walked out in protest. The new administration has promised constitutional changes to weaken the presidency and prosecutor, and to replace the heads of the intelligence services (insufficiently reformed since Communism), but the deep state, backed by the Kremlin, will resist them.
In both Slovakia and Bulgaria, the Kremlin is inciting pro-Russian forces to split the Western alliance in defence of Ukraine. It is of major importance to British policy that they don’t succeed.