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Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Tallinn, Estonia.
What was the background to the attempted assassination of the Prime Minister of Slovakia?
Well, we don't know everything. A person, 71-year-old man has been apprehended. But the background seems to be that the attempt was triggered by the climate of polarization that has been there in Slovak policies for quite some time, notably this year with elections, presidential one, last year with parliamentary elections, but even before that. So the lesson of this horrible act is that we have to be careful with the political culture and the political climate in our democracies. Otherwise, there's a risk-averse, triggering actions by individuals of this sort.
Are there really risks of a new wave of Russian attempts to destabilize Europe?
Well, what's been happening in the last few weeks is that it's been put out warnings by NATO itself, as a matter of fact, by individual countries in NATO that they have seen indications that Russia has started to encourage recent acts of sabotage, of violence, of different sorts of disturbing and destabilizing activities throughout Europe in a way that we haven't seen to the same extent before. It is, of course, if that is the case, and this seems to be the case, a sign of the desperation of the regime in Moscow, and how it’s trying to, in different ways, escalate their confrontation with the countries of Europe. We'll see how much this will have an effect, and we'll see how much the countermeasures that will be taken will also have an effect.