Why Slovakia’s Fico hates Ukraine

Slovakia's new leader Robert Fico made waves during the country's recent election campaign by warning that he would not send "another bullet" to help Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion.

His dramatic shift from the strongly pro-Ukraine stance of the outgoing government is in part based on Slovakia's historic sympathy toward Russia, but there is also a very personal reason why Fico dislikes Ukraine, Politico reports.

It all dates back to 2009, when Fico was prime minister of Slovakia. On January 7 of that year, a long-running spat between Russia and Ukraine over natural gas boiled over and Russian gas flows across Ukraine to EU countries stopped — a crisis for Slovakia in the middle of winter.

The cutoff was costing the Slovak economy about €100 million a day as factories were forced to shut down. A desperate Fico called both Vladimir Putin, then Russian prime minister, and Ukrainian PM Yulia Tymoshenko to get the gas restarted.

Early on the morning of January 14, a Slovak delegation led by Fico landed in Kyiv to meet with the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainians made them wait, then wait some more.

Three hours after arriving, the Slovaks were taken into the meeting which, to their surprise, included members of the press. With cameras rolling, Tymoshenko spent 20 minutes berating Fico for taking Moscow's side in the gas dispute.

"It was an absolutely unpleasant situation. Fico was red with anger. It was a disaster," said a senior Slovak official with knowledge of what happened in 2009, speaking on condition of being granted anonymity. "He was humiliated."

The Slovaks then flew on to Moscow, where they were greeted by Putin at an elaborate ceremony held in the Kremlin's opulent St. George's Hall.

"After that, [Fico] began to take an openly anti-Ukrainian position," said Alexander Duleba, senior fellow at the Slovak Foreign Policy Association. "He said that we do not need to support Ukrainians, Ukraine does not need us, they do not have serious conversations with us. This is personal."

Tymoshenko, who is still active in Ukrainian politics, has no specific details about that meeting, said her spokesperson Natalia Lysova.

That wasn't Kyiv's only misstep during the gas crisis.

On January 16, then-Slovak President Ivan Gašparovič also flew to Kyiv to meet with his counterpart Viktor Yushchenko, who had told him that Naftogaz, the Ukrainian energy firm, would be able to restart some gas flows to Slovakia. But during a meeting that was supposed to get the deal done, the head of Naftogaz informed the two presidents that he wouldn't be able to do that.

It all dates back to 2009, when Fico was prime minister of Slovakia | Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images
"The Ukrainians managed to humiliate both the prime minister and the president of Slovakia," said the senior official.

Even though Tymoshenko and Putin negotiated an end to the crisis and flows resumed on January 20, the bitter taste of those experiences in Kyiv remains.

"Certain political circles in Slovakia don't trust Ukrainians," said the official.

That's now coming back to haunt Kyiv.

Slovakia has been one of Ukraine's strongest backers. It sent its eastern neighbor a Soviet-era S-300 air defense system, and was the first country, along with Poland, to send jet fighters — its entire fleet of MiG-29s. Slovakia's arms factories are also selling weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

But during the election campaign, Fico called for a dramatic change in policy, saying the EU should help negotiate a peace agreement instead of sending weapons.

He's also blamed Ukraine for the war.

"The war in Ukraine didn’t start a year ago, it started in 2014, when Ukrainian Nazis and fascists started murdering Russian citizens in the Donbas and Luhansk," he said.

In the September 30 election, Fico's populist Smer party came first with 23.4 percent of the vote. He's now set to take power at the head of a coalition of three parties.

After the election, the caretaker government halted arms shipments to Ukraine

“The outgoing bureaucratic government in Slovakia will not send any more military material to Ukraine,” a government spokesperson said.

Fico has long been sympathetic toward Moscow and the Soviet Union, so the policy shift isn’t just based on his bitter memories of his 2009 treatment in Kyiv — but it did have an impact.

“He definitely remembers what happened in 2009," Slovakia’s outgoing Foreign Minister Miroslav Wlachovský said at this month's GLOBSEC Tatra Summit.