Hostile to Russia ever since Soviet tanks appeared near her childhood home in 1968 in what was then Czechoslovakia, the now grandmother was delighted to have her photograph taken with a soldier who was fighting Russian invaders in Ukraine.
“He was a hero to me,” Lucia Stasselova, 66, said of the soldier, whom she met two years ago in Bratislava, the capital of what is now Slovakia. “Everyone wanted a picture with him. I was very happy to get one.”
The soldier, a commander of the Georgian Legion, a unit of volunteers fighting for Ukraine from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, was visiting Bratislava for a public discussion about the war in Ukraine.
The old picture of Ms. Stasselova, a retired charity worker, and the soldier, Mamuka Mamulashvili, has now put her in the firing line as an enemy of the state.
At a recent news conference, Prime Minister Robert Fico pointed to an enlarged copy of the photograph that Ms. Stasselova had posted on her Facebook page. He presented it as evidence that she was a ringleader in a coup plot aimed at toppling his government.
Ms. Stasselova — a mother of five with 13 grandchildren, a churchgoing Roman Catholic and a founder of the Foundation for the Children of Slovakia — may seem an unlikely coup plotter. But for Mr. Fico, she fits a sinister profile: She is anti-Russia and pro-Europe, and has a long record of involvement in nongovernmental organizations.
Mr. Fico, along with Prime Minister Viktor Orban in neighboring Hungary, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and other authoritarian leaders, has long been suspicious of such organizations, seeing them as agents of foreign powers, particularly the United States, meddling in their internal affairs.
For these leaders, the efforts of President Trump and his adviser Elon Musk to shut down the American foreign aid agency U.S.A.I.D., which has helped fund nonprofits abroad, have been a vindication of their long campaign against what they see as attempts to impose a liberal, globalist agenda on their countries.
In a Facebook post this past week, Mr. Fico congratulated Mr. Musk on his dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. He accused the agency of spending “several million dollars” to support nongovernmental organizations and media outlets in Slovakia “for political purposes to deform the political system and favor certain political parties.”
Ms. Stasselova said the picture of her with the Georgian commander was “the first and last time” she had met him. And she added that the children’s charity she co-founded and ran for more than a decade never received a penny from U.S.A.I.D., though it did get support from a private American group, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Nor, she continued, has there been any American funding for the organization she is currently active in, Peace for Ukraine, the organizer of recent rallies in Bratislava protesting Mr. Fico’s tilt toward Moscow.
“Why are NGOs the enemy? Because they have been fighting for democracy in this country for decades,” she said, speaking at her home in a village near Bratislava.
Michal Simecka, the leader of Slovakia’s biggest opposition party and, in Mr. Fico’s telling, a conspirator in the alleged coup plot, said the accusations were “utterly baffling.” He said he hoped to unseat Mr. Fico at the next election, but denied conspiring to topple him through violence.
“The whole narrative of a coup is made up to distract attention from real problems,” Mr. Simecka said, pointing to recent tax hikes, rising inflation and the shrinking majority in Parliament of Mr. Fico’s shaky coalition after the defection of several legislators.
Mr. Fico first warned of a coup in January after Mr. Simecka called for a no-confidence vote in Parliament. The motion was derailed after Mr. Fico demanded that legislators hold a closed-door session to discuss secret intelligence material exposing an imminent coup.
Mr. Simecka, who was shown the material, said that he was prohibited by law from revealing its contents, but added that “there is no evidence of anything” — only dark misrepresentation of humdrum NGO work as part of a big conspiracy to subvert the government.
“The prime minister sees NGOs as sinister actors manipulated by foreign powers,” he said. He added that, in the eyes of the government, U.S.A.I.D. had now replaced George Soros, the Hungarian-born American financier and philanthropist, as the master puppeteer in a purported global liberal conspiracy.
Michal Vasecka, the program director for the Bratislava Policy Institute, a research group funded by European donors, said funding from U.S.A.I.D. had played a major role in supporting independent media and nongovernmental groups immediately after the collapse of Communism in 1989. But, he said, this money had largely dried up across the region after Slovakia, the Czech Republic and six other formerly Communist countries joined the European Union in 2004.
“If the Americans want to save money, this is not the place to do it,” he said. “There is virtually none here from U.S.A.I.D.”
One of the biggest beneficiaries of American government money in recent years in Slovakia, according to official records, has been a Slovakian state agency that finances development projects abroad. Another recipient has been the Human Rights League, which received $300,000 for a project related to crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shares a border with Slovakia.
Grants from the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava went to research groups, anti-corruption activists and independent media outlets, but the sums involved were small — just a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars.
Yet, Mr. Vasecka said, “Fico really believes that Slovak civil society is funded by the Americans and if this funding did not exist everything would be peaceful for him.”
Ms. Stasselova said Mr. Fico had been making increasingly wild accusations since an attempt to assassinate him last year. The government at the time attributed the attack to an unhinged “lone wolf,” a 71-year-old amateur poet with no fixed political views, but Mr. Fico has since blamed it on his political rivals.
The biggest change, however, has been Mr. Fico’s approach to Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. He vowed during an election campaign in 2023 to stop sending weapons to Ukraine from Slovak military stocks, but since eking out a narrow win at the polls, he has ramped up verbal assaults on President Volodymyr Zelensky and Europe’s support for the nation.
In December, he traveled to Moscow for a meeting with Mr. Putin, breaking with the European Union’s policy of trying to isolate the Russian leader.
“I was so shocked when I heard he had gone to Moscow,” Ms. Stasselova said.
It was then, she said, that her group Peace for Ukraine decided that “we had to do something.” The organization, which had previously focused on fund-raising for Ukraine, including $680,000 to buy an armored demining vehicle, started organizing protests.
An initial protest in December attracted only around 3,000 people, but subsequent rallies, held every other week since, have steadily grown in size. More than 40,000, an unusually large turnout in Bratislava, a small city, took part in a rally last week organized under the slogan, “Slovakia is Europe.”
Michala Novakova, 23, a student, held up a sign mocking Mr. Fico’s claims on a coup in the making: “Where is the coup?”
The event featured a mix of young people and veteran protesters who fear that Mr. Fico wanted to take Slovakia out of the European Union and revive the close ties to Moscow that had prevailed before 1989.
“I don’t want the years before 1989 to repeat themselves,” said Dalibor Vojta, 60, an electrician. He said he never liked Mr. Fico, a former Communist who morphed into a populist nationalist, but had not worried much about where he might take Slovakia until the prime minister went to see Mr. Putin.
Ms. Stasselova said that being cast as a coup plotter had resulted in her phone being flooded with abusive messages. But she was comforted by the fact that nobody she knew took the accusations seriously. “Everyone is laughing,” she said.
And sooner or later, she added, the storm will pass: “This week I am the person to attack. Next week it will be somebody else.”
Sara Cincurova contributed reporting.
