Slovakia has dispatched Brigadier General Slavomir Staviarsky and Colonel Ivo Gahir to Moscow and is preparing to receive Russian military attaché Maxim Verezan in Bratislava, restoring military-diplomatic representation severed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The move makes Slovakia the first NATO member to voluntarily reopen this specific channel since the collective expulsions that followed the invasion. The government's stated rationale is information-gathering. Richard Gluck, chair of parliament's defense and security committee and a member of Fico's Smer party, told public broadcaster STVR that ending the posting had been a mistake: "We were losing a great deal of information." He pointed to American, British, and French military diplomats still stationed in Moscow. Slovak military intelligence said Staviarsky's role is to assess the security and military-political situation and keep the Defense Ministry informed. The opposition's counter is blunt and structural: the arrangement is asymmetric by design. Opposition defense experts told Aktuality.sk that a Slovak attaché in Moscow would be closely watched and obtain little useful intelligence, while the reciprocal Russian posting could facilitate espionage and influence operations in Slovakia. The precedent is recent and specific — in 2021, Russian deputy military attaché Sergei Solomasov was filmed recruiting and paying Bohus Garbar, a contributor to pro-Russian website Hlavne Spravy. Solomasov was expelled in 2022; Garbar was convicted of espionage and bribery. Retired Lieutenant General Pavel Macko, a former Slovak deputy chief of defense and once the highest-ranking Slovak general in NATO's command structures, called the decision "a very serious step." He noted that nothing has changed since 2022 — Russia's adversarial activities continue to grow in Slovakia and the region. Macko pointed to a foiled plot to burn down a Ukrainian-owned drone factory in eastern Slovakia and suspicions that incidents in Munich and Leipzig were linked to Russian operations based in Slovakia. He warned that political influence over Slovakia's intelligence services could further damage intelligence-sharing and trust among allies. Former MP Martin Poliacik of the opposition Progressive Slovakia party identified an electoral motive. With Fico eyeing re-election next year, the prime minister's best narrative is that "everyone else is dragging us into war and he alone wants peace." Poliacik argued Fico will claim he is uniquely positioned to talk to Putin about ending the war, requiring an exceptionally close relationship. Meanwhile, Slovak arms manufacturers continue supplying Ukraine with ammunition under commercial contracts — a detail Fico tries to keep quiet. Poliacik drew a careful distinction between formal compliance and political trust. Slovakia continues to fulfill its NATO commitments on paper. But as he put it: "Predictability is not the same as reliability." The signal to NATO allies is not in the formal ledger — it is in the political choices that fall outside it. One additional military attaché does not fundamentally change the intelligence picture, Poliacik acknowledged, but the political signal it sends is the point. The structural problem is not that Slovakia wants diplomatic channels. It is who benefits from this particular channel, under this particular political environment, at this particular moment. A NATO member state voluntarily reopening a known intelligence vector — while its own intelligence services face political pressure and its prime minister meets Putin in the Kremlin — creates an asymmetry that serves Moscow's operational interests far more than Bratislava's informational ones.
