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The assassination attempt on the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico shows how far the Ukraine war has raised the political temperature of Europe above boiling point.

Juraj Cintula, a 71-year-old former security guard, amateur poet and alleged would-be assassin, is described by the authorities as being “a lone wolf”, but the attack evidently had its origin in the ferocious political confrontations in Slovakia stoked by the conflict in Ukraine.

Assassinations usually come in two basic types – those carried out by individuals acting on their own and those carried out openly or covertly by governments.

The latter are seldom described as “assassinations” but as “targeted killings”, such as the Israeli killing of three Iranian generals in their consulate in Damascus on 1 April. Yet there is little real difference between the two in terms of motivation and effects.

The war in Ukraine and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza are now producing about one international crisis a month, with each crisis marking an escalation in violence and instability. Political leaders seldom understand that wars automatically produce “wildcards” like assassinations and other unforeseeable acts of violence that catch decision makers by surprise.

This happens because all sides in a war try to do something unexpected which will hurt their enemy. Moreover, hatreds and fears bred on far away battlefields may impel individuals to take a gun and do some killing themselves.

The poison of the Ukraine war and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has by now envenomed the political atmosphere in much of the world. The Fico assassination bid could be the precursor of a wave of private and state assassinations similar to that in the US in the 60s.

But killing leaders seldom solves anything. Suppose that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeds in his aim of killing Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, does anybody imagine that this will bring an end to the Palestinian demand for a homeland? Realistically, the greater the military success of Israel in Gaza, the more likely it is that Palestinians will resort to acts of terror to keep their cause alive, just as they did after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967.

Assassinations are an integral component of warfare. Abraham Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth at the end of the American Civil War in 1865 in the hope of reviving Confederate resistance.

Controversy has raged over how much the Confederate government knew about the conspiracy to kill Lincoln and other Union leaders. But it had certainly supported an earlier plan by Booth to kidnap the president. Confederate leaders must have known how easily a kidnapping could turn into a killing.

The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo was part of a plot whose organisers were linked to Serbian intelligence. In the event, the killing achieved its aim because it helped........

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