Slovak politicians have said they were forced to change their route during a trip to Moscow
Poland has blocked a Slovak jet carrying a parliamentary delegation to Russia from passing through its airspace, Slovak politicians told state broadcaster TASR on Sunday. Warsaw has denied the accusation.
The Slovak delegation led by Andrej Danko and Tibor Gaspar, deputy speakers of the National Council, was set to meet lawmakers and government officials in Moscow to discuss trade and gas supplies in the wake of Ukraine’s refusal to transit gas to the country.
However, Warsaw’s decision to block its airspace forced the delegation to fly over the Czech Republic and Germany in order to reach their destination, TASR reported.
“I don’t understand Poland’s position, but I accept it as a reality,” Danko told the broadcaster. He added that he also wanted to shed light on life in Russia.
“I want to show that people live there too, that Germans, French, Americans do business there,” Danko said.
The Polish Foreign Ministry provided a different account of the events. “We did not bar the Slovak side from flying [over Poland]. They just sent us incomplete documents, and after we asked them to correct them, they informed us about the change of the route,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Pawel Wronski told reporters.
Relations between Kiev and Bratislava remain tense because of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s criticism of Western military aid to Ukraine.
The Slovak leader has long been a proponent of a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Upon taking office in late 2023, Fico ended his country’s military assistance to Kiev and vowed to veto Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO.
On Sunday, Fico threatened to veto proposed EU aid packages to Kiev and even suggested that he could cut electricity supplies to Ukraine.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski celebrated Ukraine’s decision to cut off the flow of Russian gas into Europe as “another victory.”
Moscow has stressed that Kiev’s decision to discontinue Russian gas transit only benefits the US at the expense of its European allies. The US is the “main beneficiary of this redistribution in the Old World energy markets, and the main sponsor of the Ukrainian crisis,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
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