Both the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine became major crises for public managers in the Visegrad 4 states of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Each of those states responded in different ways to the two crises, based on their ideologies and levels of capabilities. Of course, the two crises themselves were very different in terms of their impact on the public and the set of public managers that needed to make critical decisions. This work proposes that there are three stages in crisis management, and that theoretical perspective will lay the groundwork for analysis of the four states. Those stages include Risk Assessment, Risk Management, and Risk Communication. Taken together, they offer a portrayal of the Resilience of each state in terms of both public management and the general public.
