Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and frequent forecaster of World War III, did not hesitate to compare the would-be assassin of Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia to the young man who sparked World War I. Europe, he suggested, was once more on the edge.
The person who shot Fico, a nationalist leader who favors friendly relations with Russia, was “a certain inverted version of Gavrilo Princip,” Medvedev said on the social network Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, began what Winston Churchill called “the most difficult, the cruellest” of all wars.
It was a wild association to make on many levels. The Europe of empires that fell apart between 1914 and 1918 is long gone, as is the Europe that replaced it and produced Auschwitz. Instead, the painstakingly constructed European Union of 27 members, including Slovakia, was created with the overarching goal of making war impossible on a long-ravaged continent.
