Pellegrini: Linking Official Visit to Russia with Election Is Nonsense

Bratislava, 24 March (TASR) - Linking an official working visit to Russia and talks with the Russian prime minister on energy supplies to speculation about election interference in Slovakia is "nonsense beyond belief", said Slovak President Peter Pellegrini in a video on social media on Tuesday. Pellegrini reacted in this way to media reports about discussions with Russian representatives allegedly concerning interference in Slovakia's 2020 parliamentary elections. The president hinted that the information might be an attempt to defame him. He noted that his meeting with the new Prime Russian Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, in February 2020 was one of dozens of working trips that he took. He underlined that the fulcrum of the meeting was guarantees of energy supplies from Russia. "At a time when new packages of sanctions by the European Union against the Russian Federation were introduced, we wanted to ensure that supplies of oil, natural gas and nuclear fuel to Slovakia would continue to be guaranteed," said Pellegrini, who was accompanied on the trip by then economy minister Peter Ziga. Pellegrini said that he considered the meeting and talks on guarantees for Slovakia's energy security important also in the context of likely political developments ahead of the parliamentary elections in Slovakia. "We had to address this partly because everything indicated a victory for the opposition, which was completely unprepared to govern the country properly," he said. Pellegrini described a number of measures taken by his government before and after the parliamentary elections as steps to ensure "that people wouldn't be left at the mercy of experiments by an incoming, unprepared and revenge-driven Matovic government". He rejected ever discussing possible election interference with the Russian prime minister, calling such claims entirely nonsensical and illogical. "The idea that a newly appointed prime minister of the Russian Federation, completely unknown in Slovakia, could influence elections within a few days is so absurd that it can only be spread by people devoid of any hesitation to lie," stressed the president. Pellegrini also stated that a similar narrative appeared a few days before the 2024 presidential election, in which he ran. This was put forward by the Jan Kuciak Investigative Centre, citing material from an intelligence service in an unnamed European country. "Today, similar material by the same author is appearing three weeks before parliamentary elections in Hungary. So, I ask whether this is a coincidence or another attempt to cause damage during an election campaign, this time with respect to developments in Hungary," added Pellegrini. According to Dennik N daily, before Slovakia's elections in 2020 Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto explained to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at the request of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, that it was "critically important" for Hungary to make sure that the then-coalition in Slovakia remained in power and that receiving then-prime minister Peter Pellegrini in Moscow would "greatly help him to win the election". mf/df