Putin’s New Friend in the Heart of Europe
Is Slovakia’s prime minister a Russian stooge?
HAS VLADIMIR PUTIN QUIETLY ACQUIRED a new imperial possession in the heart of Europe, embedded within the EU and NATO? The suggestion may sound hyperbolic, but reports from Bratislava are becoming stranger by the day.
Consider this: Slovakia’s Prime Minister, Robert Fico, visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow on December 23, ostensibly to make the case for a continued Russian supply of natural gas to Slovakia. It is unclear what, if anything, he negotiated at the meeting because, in a break with normal practice, he was not accompanied by Slovak diplomats.
More oddly, it remains unclear how he traveled to Moscow, as there is no record of government planes making the trip. His whereabouts for twelve days during the holiday season are equally opaque. Fico’s new year’s video greeting, in which he lashed out against Ukraine and made threats against Ukrainian refugees living in Slovakia, was geolocated to a $6,000-a-night suite at a luxury hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Fico has refused to explain what brought him to Vietnam, what his travel arrangements were, or who paid for his lavish accommodations. In 2017, during a previous stint as prime minister, a Slovak government plane was lent to Vietnamese authorities to essentially kidnap Trinh Xuan Thanh, a Vietnamese party official and businessman who had been seeking asylum in Germany, back to Vietnam.
More importantly, since his return, Fico has stepped up in his rhetorical offensive against Ukraine, hinting at stopping Slovakia’s humanitarian assistance to Ukraine (the country no longer provides military aid) and at using Slovakia’s veto in the European Council, presumably to derail EU-level initiatives to help Ukraine, to sanction Russia, or to continue Ukraine’s EU integration.
How much of a discontinuity does Fico’s anti-Ukrainian turn represent? After all, his party campaigned on a platform of ending Slovak military assistance to Ukraine and helping to negotiate a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine—a pale, crude imitation of Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric. Fico himself has a long history of bitter complaints about America and the supposed diktat from Brussels—which he has hitherto combined with a dose of pragmatism, mostly keeping his head down at Council meetings.
At NATO’s July summit in Washington, Slovakia’s president, Peter Pellegrini, a Fico ally, backed Ukraine’s eventual membership in the alliance. In September, Fico, Pellegrini, and the speaker of Slovak parliament, the three highest officers of state, signed a memorandum outlining Slovakia’s continued commitment to EU and NATO membership in an attempt to reassure those who feared that the country might be veering off on an anti-Western trajectory.
Yet Fico’s own rhetoric about Ukraine has continued to harden. Since the expiration of a contract between Russia and Ukraine allowing Russia to pump gas through Ukraine to Slovakia and other locations in Central Europe, Fico’s words have become almost belligerent. Upon his return from Russia and Vietnam, he called for a revision of the memorandum on Slovakia’s foreign policy, in part to reflect a pan-European “rise of ideas different from those advanced by Brussels.”
Simultaneously, Fico’s foreign minister, Juraj Blanár, has been busy purging the ministry of prominent pro-Western voices, while also making new hires (146 of them, according to one investigation, out of a total of about 1200 employees), many of them educated in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Slovakia’s new ambassador to Minsk, Jozef Migaš, is a former Communist Party apparatchik with an advanced degree in “scientific communism.” The ambassador to Moscow, Peter Priputen, already served one tour in Russia as ambassador and is reputed to have a vast, friendly network there—an asset for any diplomat, to be sure, but one that exacerbates risks of “going local.”
Blanár himself called Russia “a reliable partner” and met with Lavrov three times in 2024. This is no longer business as usual, nor is it Orbán cosplay. It is the conclusion of a patient, decade-long effort by Russia to co-opt key Slovak politicians and a large segment of public opinion to peel the country away from the Western alliance.
Russian propaganda has made extraordinary inroads with the Slovak public. The Facebook page of Russian Embassy in Slovakia, posting Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories multiple times a day, has 69,000 followers—more than twice as many as the page of Russian Embassy in Washington in a country with less than 3 percent of the population. Unlike the more transactional, calculated attitudes that one finds in Berlin, Vienna, or Budapest, Slovakia’s Putin-Versteheren are infused with a genuine panslavic delusion, a holdover from the nineteenth century, which places Russia at the center of Slavic nations.
Those who expected Fico’s current term to be a repetition of his earlier times in office—a combination of divisive, Orbánesque rhetoric, domestic corruption, and a dose of pragmatism in the European institutions—have already been proven wrong. Since he survived an assassination attempt in May, Fico has been acting more impatiently and ruthlessly to cement his hold on power. Putin is clearly ready to extend to Fico the same support he did to other pliable politicians in what he considers Russia’s “near abroad,” like of Bidzina Ivanishvili in Georgia, Ilan Shor in Moldova, or Calin Georgescu in Romania: interference on his behalf in future Slovak elections and continued poisoning of the country’s information space.
Given the current turbulence in the transatlantic relationship, it is possible that Russia would even assist directly in a crackdown on opposition and civil society, perhaps even through violence. After all, the Biden administration has been slow to respond to similar events in Georgia, and President-elect Trump’s team may be relied on to cheer on Putin and Fico, just as Elon Musk is cheering for pro-Russian political forces in Germany and the UK.
Slovakia has not yet been lost. Since Fico’s electoral victory in October 2023, the opposition has been able to bring people to the streets in large numbers. There are, moreover, figures within Fico’s own coalition, especially in President Pellegrini’s Hlas Party, who are not thrilled about the rightward veer. Fico’s obnoxiousness offensive against Ukraine and the West may be aimed at humiliating them, or at forcing a reckoning in the form of a government collapse and an early election. Slovakia has flirted with soft authoritarianism before, especially in 1998, and exceeded expectations. Here’s hoping it can do it again.
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