Premier Fico Set to Meet French President Macron next Thursday

Bratislava, 23 January (TASR) - I'll hold bilateral talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris next Thursday, 29 January, Prime Minister Robert Fico (Smer-SD) posted on social media on Friday, adding that the agenda for the talks will be "enormous." The premier announced the meeting shortly after returning to Slovakia from trips to Brussels and Paris. On Thursday evening (22 January), he attended an extraordinary meeting of the European Council in the Belgian capital, convened by European Council President Antonio Costa in connection with US President Donald Trump's threats concerning Greenland. According to Fico, the meeting was informal and didn't produce any conclusions. "A video conference would have been sufficient to state that we're interested in cooperating with the US, that we support the territorial integrity of Denmark and Greenland, and that we must be stronger in order to withstand the consequences of the new US foreign policy, and we could have saved a lot of money," he said. At the meeting, the leaders of the member states also discussed Ukraine, which, according to the Slovak prime minister, has been pushed into the background by the American interest in acquiring Greenland. Fico pointed out that Ukrainian civilians are exposed to winter weather and power outages due to the war. In this context, he emphasised that in January of this year, Slovakia supplied Ukraine with twice as much emergency electricity as it did in the entire previous year and is prepared to help Ukrainians in other ways as well. am