The author is a former politician and former ambassador to Hungary and the Czech Republic.
The domestic and international uproar surrounding the meeting between the Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin is completely justified. This visit has several very disturbing dimensions. Let’s mention at least some of them.
However, for reasons of space, we will leave aside the legend about the heroic struggle of our main representative of sovereign foreign policy to all four world parties for the supply of gas to Slovakia via Ukraine, which he seduced in Moscow.
Fico is not worried about the fate of Ukraine
It is obvious that the issue of gas transit through Ukraine should and could have been resolved by our prime minister a long time ago, namely with the Ukrainian president. However, for that he would have to build normal relations with Volodymyr Zelensky, not insult him and then provoke a conflict with him at the next meeting of the European Council, while suffering a fiasco.
The heads of government of the EU member states did not support their Slovak colleague, which gave Robert Fico an excuse to fly to Moscow and pretend that he was going to repair the damage done to the Slovak nation by the Ukrainian president.
It is worth noting that the prime minister made it clear with his rhetoric how closely he perceives our national interest in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. It reduces it to the volumes of gas and oil that will transit through Ukraine to our territory and then on to Europe, and to the fees that the Slovak Republic will receive for this transit.
Whether Ukraine will remain a sovereign state, how it will recover from the damage inflicted by Russia, whether and how it will be able to integrate into the EU, whether peace will be permanent and so on, is obviously not a concern of Prime Minister Fico.
He feels comfortable in Putin’s company
The most important and tragic thing is that Robert Fico legitimized Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by traveling to the Russian president, who committed a crime against peace by starting the biggest war in Europe since 1945. In doing so, he also denied the entire policy of the EU and NATO towards Russian aggression and the Russian president and his government. He sabotaged her.
The Slovak Prime Minister also laughed at the Ukrainian victims of this terrible war, tens of thousands of civilians, including children, women who lost their sons and husbands, children who lost their parents. He showed indifference to Russia’s systematic destruction of energy infrastructure in order to let Ukrainians simply freeze to death.
He demonstrated extraordinary moral decay when he voluntarily, as an alleged gas beggar, came to the Kremlin to shake the hand of the man who caused the tragedy by his orders, and for whom the International Criminal Court based in The Hague issued an arrest warrant on suspicion of the war crime of illegally deporting children from Ukraine to Russia. And he made it clear how the criminal Russian president fascinates him and he feels comfortable in his company.
The Slovak prime minister thus completed his Munich policy towards neighboring Ukraine. She began by rejecting the definition of the Slovak national interest, which was contained in the Declaration of the National Assembly of the Slovak Republic on the military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, for which he voted on February 25, 2022. He decided to win the election with the slogan “not a bullet for Ukraine”.
Whole generations of Ukrainians will not forget it
His message was that the war would end when Ukraine had no weapons to defend itself. That is, when he surrenders to the Russian army and accepts Putin’s humiliating conditions for the liquidation of independent Ukrainian statehood. He called the politicians who advocated and practically implemented the sending of military material to Ukraine warmongers.
He hypocritically made the EU and NATO – because the Slovak Republic is a member of these groups – responsible for “killing Slavs”. He insulted the Ukrainian president and Ukrainians and, in the spirit of Russian propaganda, made Ukraine responsible for the war. Quotations of these shameful statements would take up a lot of space.
Let us at least mention the hoax about the “genocide of the Russian-speaking population in Donbas”, which is also refuted by the official website of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He never visited Kyiv and was not interested in building a normal neighborly relationship with Ukrainian President Zelensky.
When the reconstruction of Ukraine is at stake, Slovak companies may lose important opportunities because of this Munich policy of the Prime Minister, which the Ukrainians fighting for bare existence will not forget for generations.
Having such a prime minister is tragic
The Munich approach to Ukraine is also evidenced by the fact that the Slovak Prime Minister approved the imperialist and revisionist motive of military aggression against independent and sovereign Ukraine at a meeting in the Kremlin.
His host, Vladimir Putin – and Russian propaganda repeats it after him – has repeatedly stated that Ukrainians are not a separate nation, but part of the Russian nation, that Ukraine is an artificial state and historically belongs to Russia, that Russia has no borders.
In other words, he has the right to expand wherever he wants. Also to return the balance of power in Europe before 1997. With his meeting with the Russian president, Robert Fico politically accepted both the annexation of Ukrainian territories by the Russian State Duma and the actual annexation of Ukrainian territories by Russian troops.
It was done by a Slovak politician who must remember how the first Czechoslovak Republic paid for German and Hungarian revisionism with the Munich Agreement and the Vienna Arbitration and other misfortunes.
Considering this historical experience of ours as well as the fact that we are neighboring a state whose political elites have not been able to deal with the Trianon trauma even after 104 years, it is tragic that we have a Prime Minister who does not mind that Russia does not respect the Helsinki Act and changes the international situation with military force recognized borders of Ukraine from 1991.
Robert Fico pretends that the reckless Russian attack on the territorial integrity of Ukraine is not an extremely dangerous precedent that can encourage other revisionists and plunge Europe into military conflicts again.
He humiliated President Pellegrini
The way in which the trip of the head of the Slovak government to Moscow was prepared, announced and carried out is downright scandalous. He bears all the hallmarks of the behavior of an autocratic ruler. It is clear from the statements of the President of the Republic and his advisor for foreign policy that the head of state was not informed in advance about such an important meeting.
The Prime Minister thus openly politically humiliated Petr Pellegrini. Not to mention the acting chairman of the NR SR, Petr Žig. Robert Fico fundamentally devalued the joint statement on the uniform procedure of the highest constitutional officials in foreign policy, which they signed on September 1.
He effectively canceled the validity of this document, because there is nothing in its text about special relations with the Russian Federation. The question is whether the Slovak government will approve the trip of its chairman to the Russian president. And even if it were, with what specific task?
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Denisa Sakova also had to experience her share of humiliation, who tried to solve the issue of Russian gas supplies to Slovakia during two visits to St. Petersburg, only to end up not going with the Prime Minister to Moscow, where gas was to be discussed again.
Even the members of the National Council remained completely aside. Like the citizens of Slovakia, they learned about the upcoming trip to Moscow with such groundbreaking consequences – just look at the valid Security Strategy of the Slovak Republic – on Saturday evening from the Serbian president.
And a day later, already at the time of the negotiations, from the spokesman of the Russian president. Model democracy, transparency and respect for citizens and political partners! We still do not know how the prime minister got to Moscow and where he went afterwards.
What does Putin have to pay for this?
However, the most important thing is that the two-hour conversation with the president of the state, who declared all EU member states, including Slovakia, as enemy states and represents the main security threat to EU and NATO member states, took place without witnesses. As Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced, it was a face-to-face conversation, without a recording.
Citizens of Slovakia, members of parliament, coalition partners of Smer, members of the government, the president, but also allies in the EU and NATO can now think and argue about what the two have agreed on. What and how does the Slovak prime minister have to pay Putin politically and otherwise for the agreement and what is he supposed to get.
Since Robert Fico, with his sovereign foreign policy, destroyed the credibility of his fourth government with the allies even before the trip to Moscow, it is questionable who among them will trust the Slovak government, its ministers and secret services at the time of the biggest security crisis in Europe since 1989.
Fitz’s Mephistophelian deal
Especially when the Allies register a growing pro-Russian fifth column in the Slovak ruling parties (see the January trip of Andrej Danko et al. to the State Duma), but also in the opposition Republic. When they see the lax approach of the Slovak security authorities to Russian influence operations on our territory, which aim to destroy citizens’ trust in the EU and NATO.
When they know that up to 47 percent of the voters of the strongest ruling party, which has turned into a far-right political formation, are in favor of Slovakia leaving the EU. Robert Fico severely damaged the international political position and influence of the Slovak Republic, especially in the environment on which it is economically most dependent. Just read the reactions in the Czech Republic, which was until recently the closest to us.
He definitively broke the foreign policy and security consensus in Slovak society and gave a powerful impetus to its even stronger polarization on the vital question of where the Slovak Republic should geopolitically belong 35 years after November. This will sap the political energy needed to halt the decline and modernize our republic and jeopardize its ability to confront security threats.
We will find out soon whether he helped his party’s electoral preferences with his political adventure in Moscow. Gradually, the real price will be revealed, which we the citizens, but also he himself, will pay for his Mephistophelian secret agreement with Emperor Putin.
