Slovak Foreign and European Affairs Minister Juraj Blanár summoned the Russian ambassador in Bratislava for talks at the ministry. The reason: a Russian drone hit a building belonging to Ukraine's Security Service in Kyiv, and that building stands in the immediate vicinity of the Slovak embassy's consular section.

"We call on Russia to refrain from actions that may endanger the lives and safety of innocent civilians," Blanár said. At the same time he called on both sides in the conflict to avoid further escalation, which raises tensions and does not contribute to a peaceful settlement.

Both sides. That is the diplomatic formulation used when you want to say something but do not want to say it too loudly - and when you know that the drone over your building was not launched by both sides.

An empty office as an argument

Blanár stressed that nobody was in the consular section at the moment of the attack. That part of the embassy is, as he put it, used on a limited basis for security reasons. Which means Slovak diplomacy had already worked out that the building was not a safe place - long before the drone.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that the Russian drone had hit the headquarters of Ukraine's Security Service in Kyiv and was aimed "directly at the office" of acting director Oleksandr Poklad.

This is the situation diplomats call collateral proximity and ordinary people call luck. Fifty metres of difference and the Slovak protest would not have been about a damaged facade. Small states with embassies in war zones live on exactly that margin, and usually find out about it after the fact.

Slovakia is not a random player in this story. Its government is among the softest in the EU towards Moscow and the loudest against further military aid to Kyiv. And it is precisely that government which today had to summon the Russian ambassador. That is what happens when foreign policy is made for the domestic audience, and the war does not read the same audience.

Do small states have any instrument at all beyond summoning an ambassador to a ministry? In the Balkans that is not a theoretical question - we have asked it many times, and rarely got an answer that cost more than one statement.