Slovak prime minister's language echoes Putin's talk of "root causes" of the Ukraine war.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico praised the Putin-Trump summit in Alaska and echoed Kremlin rhetoric in discussing the prospect of security guarantees to help bring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to an end.
“The war in Ukraine has historical roots, and we must speak equally about security guarantees for both Ukraine and Russia,” Fico said in a video posted on Facebook Saturday, comments that were jumped on by Russian state-controlled media Kommersant.
Russia President Vladimir Putin has long spoken about the “root causes” of the war, a phrase Moscow uses to argue that Ukraine posed security threats that justified Putin’s 2022 invasion.
Putin used the phrase most recently on Friday, after his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Alaska, citing Ukraine’s NATO ambitions and false claims that Nazis are running the Ukrainian government.
“The Alaska summit accomplished several tasks,” Fico said. “For the first time, it rejected a black-and-white view of the military conflict in Ukraine.”
The one-on-one meeting between the U.S. and Russian leaders also “kick-started the standardization of relations between Russia and the united States,” he said.
The meeting “seemed to erase the single mandatory stance on the war so firmly promoted by the Biden administration, and still pushed by a group of powerful players in the European Union,” Fico said.
The summit “held up a mirror to those European leaders who wish for a new Iron Curtain between Europe and Russia,” Fico said, noting that sanctions on the Russian leadership won’t help.
The Slovak leader has aligned himself with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a pro-Russian voice in the EU, but unlike Orbán, supported EU leaders’ statement to Trump ahead of the meeting in Alaska.
