Robert Fico, the highly controversial three-time former prime minister who opposes military support to Ukraine, looks set to win Slovakia’s parliamentary elections on Sept. 30. He has pledged to reverse the EU and NATO member state’s political direction, after years of deep reforms designed to realign Slovakia with the EU mainstream.
Many observers have turned a critical eye to pre-invasion predictions about Russia’s war on Ukraine, given how wrong they turned out to be. But the reason they were wrong is inherent to the nature of warfare itself. Our ability to accurately predict the course of a war is compromised by the inherent uncertainty of war.
In the two decades before invading Ukraine, as Russia attempted to project power around the globe, Moscow quietly boosted its military ties and diplomatic engagement in Southeast Asia. Now, however, that influence seems to be dramatically fading, largely cutting Moscow out of a critical region in global politics.
In early June, Ukrainian forces launched a long-anticipated, large-scale counteroffensive into Russian-controlled territory in the eastern portions of Ukraine. From the beginning, the fog of war surrounding developments on the ground has been thick, raising understandable questions, perhaps most importantly: Is it succeeding?