Former Charity Worker and Activist Faces an Unlikely Accusation: Coup Plotter
A woman who runs a pro-Ukraine group has been accused by Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia of plotting to topple him as part of his campaign against organizations he says are funded from abroad.
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.
