Same cream-colored armchairs, same handshake and same frozen smile from Vladimir Putin. The photos of the Russian president receiving the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico, on Sunday December 22, recall the photos taken during the visit of the Hungarian Viktor Orban to the Kremlin in July. There is no shortage of parallels between the two men, who do not fear diplomatic lurches and have both been ambiguous towards Moscow since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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The two Central European leaders are also the only ones among the Twenty-Seven to have made the trip since 2022 – with the conservative Austrian Chancellor, Karl Nehammer, but the latter, less conciliatory than his two counterparts, has no longer been going back and forth since the first spring of the war.
On Facebook, Robert Fico said he wanted “normalize” Slovakia's relations with Russia. He also said he had received assurances from Vladimir Putin that Moscow was willing to continue its gas deliveries to Central Europe, one of the challenges of this visit. Slovakia, more than two-thirds of whose gas still came from Russia in 2023, remains in fact dependent on the Kremlin for energy. However, these supplies could stop from 1is January 2025, after expiration of a transit contract through Ukraine.
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