Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

When 21-year-old Almunthir Daqamah allegedly appeared at the University of Surrey’s Manor Park Student Village on Thursday morning and shot a campus safety officer with a high-powered crossbow, attention immediately turned to the weapon of choice.

Unlike the broader pattern of knife crime — where everyday bladed objects such as kitchen knives and utility blades still account for the majority of offensive weapons — recent cases have drawn attention to a different category of violence. Following Daqamah’s arrest and Vickrum Digwa’s conviction for the murder of University of Southampton student Henry Nowak, scrutiny has shifted toward the use of unlicensed, legal, or culturally sanctioned items as weapons.

This raises wider questions about the availability and misuse of so-called “ceremonial” or sporting objects — items that may be designed for display or sport, but can be adapted for lethal use and are readily obtainable online or in specialist markets. In Digwa’s case, the court also heard claims of a religious justification, further complicating how intent and cultural framing intersect with the use of such weapons.

Ordered, most likely, online and delivered to almost any address, a crossbow can be purchased in the UK without a license, background check, or routine police oversight. Under current British law, acquiring one is not materially more difficult than buying a penknife or a pack of razor blades. According to the Office for National Statistics, crossbow incidents are typically subsumed within broader categories such as “sharp instrument” offenses or general assault data, making it difficult to isolate the scale of their use. Nevertheless, legal practitioners familiar with such cases suggest these cases are not rare in practice.

A spate of crossbow murders stretching from 2018 to 2025 finally resulted in the Home Office announcing this year that crossbow sales would be banned and that existing owners would require a suitability license. But the legislation is not yet in force.

Crossbows, air rifles and now, as the Digwa case illustrates, large Sikh daggers — or shastars — are only the most visible symptoms of a larger and less-discussed problem: the weapons Britain has quietly decided to tolerate. There is an entire ecosystem of quasi-military and ceremonial objects operating beneath the threshold of serious legal scrutiny, available to anyone with an online shopping account, a grudge, and in some cases, a claimed religious mandate.

Browse the crossbow market and the design language reveals something significant. These are not tools for sport. The aesthetic is tactical: Picatinny rails, pistol grips, foregrips, suppressors, the full grammar of the assault rifle transposed onto a medieval projectile weapon. The crossbow manufacturers know their market.

And the crossbow is not even the biggest problem. Converted handguns — blank-firing weapons originally designed for theater, film, and starting pistols — were responsible for more shooting incidents in the UK in 2023 than real firearms, accounting for four deaths and 17 serious injuries in that year alone.

What connects these weapons is the space they occupy in the cultural imagination of a particular kind of violent actor: not the professional criminal, who will source a firearm through established networks regardless of legality, but the disaffected loner, the jilted lover, the ideological obsessive — the young (though not always) man in a private war with a world that has failed or humiliated him.

For this figure, the crossbow, the zombie knife, the replica pistol modified in a bedroom, the shastar or samurai sword all serve a similar psychological function: props in a fantasy of agency, violence rendered theatrical or cinematic, the GTA hitman or guerrilla insurgent made briefly real. It is Travis Bickle sharpening a knife in front of a mirror — except he is not on screen. He is in your street. The weapon is not incidental to the pathology; it is part of it.

The Surrey attack should prompt more than a debate about fast-tracking crossbow licensing. It raises a harder question: whether Britain has the language to understand what these weapons signify to those who use them — and the will to regulate not just the objects, but the culture that sustains them.

The arsenal of the disaffected does not begin with an online purchase. It begins with a male fantasy the law has been reluctant to confront, and a culture that too often excuses offensive weapons so long as the perpetrator looks like he belongs.

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David Matthews is an award-winning writer.

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