Slovakia is the cyberpunk of Europe

At 6:00 PM on May 8, 2026, the plane carrying Robert Fico, the Slovak Prime Minister and leader of the Direction – Social Democracy party (SMER-SD), landed in Moscow. This fact was covered in great detail by both Russian and European media, and for good reason.

A week earlier, Lithuania and Poland had officially stated that they would not allow Fico’s plane to pass through their airspace on its way to the Russian capital. In order to avoid taking a long detour, Slovakia’s air route was reluctantly provided by Germany, Sweden, and Finland.

For Robert Fico, who has served as Slovakia’s prime minister since 2023 (and previously in 2006-2010 and 2012-2018), this was his third trip to the Russian capital for Victory Day celebrations. The first was back in 2015, when Fico marked the 70th anniversary of victory alongside then-Czech Prime Minister Miloš Zeman. The context of that parade was dramatic: despite the milestone anniversary, the 2015 parade cemented a shift in the list of high-ranking guests, in which Western leaders came to make up the smallest possible share.

At that time, a new participation format was introduced: leaders did not attend the stands on Red Square to watch the parade of Russian elite troops and equipment, but instead appeared only for the laying of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin walls. Thus, during the 2015 parade itself, Fico and Zeman held a working meeting and joined later for the Minute of Remembrance.

Fico’s second visit, on May 9, 2025, cost him dearly in terms of electoral support. The 80th anniversary of victory, along with the relatively strong personal ratings of Fico and his party, encouraged the prime minister to attend the parade. The consequences were swift: SMER-SD’s rating fell from 24% to 18%, its lowest level in the preceding three years of Fico’s time in office. Protests took place in Bratislava, and were attended by up to 60,000 people. It would seem that a tough lesson should have been learned – and yet the charismatic Fico is in Moscow once again.

Motives and context

To understand the Slovak leader’s motives, one has to look closely at Slovakia’s domestic political landscape and the foreign policy meetings Fico has held in recent months. At the beginning of February, the country declared a state of emergency in the oil sector in connection with the cutoff of Russian oil transit through Ukraine.

Officially, the issue was said to be pipeline damage in Ukraine. However, the leaders of Slovakia and Hungary (which also was not receiving Russian oil) stated that the problem was rooted in Kiev’s political decisions. Interruptions in energy supplies for Slovakia threaten disruptions to key industrial sectors concentrated in automobile manufacturing, which accounts for about 13% of the country’s GDP and nearly half of the republic’s total exports.

These include plants such as Jaguar Land Rover in Nitra and KIA in Žilina. Because of their production needs, they are critically dependent on deliveries of industrial diesel products and plastics (petrochemical products) from Slovakia’s only oil refinery, Slovnaft. In terms of direct employment, about 9,000 families work at the plants in Nitra and Žilina. Further along the chain, one job on the assembly line creates up to four jobs among suppliers (logistics, seating, plastics, catering). Thus, the real dependency rises to 35,000-40,000 people. Beyond them, other key players in the market – Volkswagen Bratislava, Volvo in Košice, and others – would also begin to stall because of energy shortages. Altogether, another 230,000 or so people are employed in this broader sector.

At the same time, for Fico, who has crossed the midpoint of his current term as prime minister, it is extremely important to prepare for the next electoral campaign, which will culminate in September 2027 – both to avoid alienating the party’s core voter base and to expand its support beyond it. That can be achieved only by preventing serious political and economic crises like the oil sector emergency that occurred in February of this year.

A second important factor is Fico’s recent foreign-policy meetings. Among the most resonant was the European Political Community summit in Yerevan on May 4, 2026. During the event, the attention of the Russian audience was focused on the Slovak leader’s closed-door meeting with Zelensky, where support for Ukraine’s accession to the EU was discussed. After the meeting, Fico said he would convey Ukrainian proposals to the Russian leader during talks following the Victory Day celebrations on May 9. We can assume that a “package of proposals,” or ultimatum, on transit issues will be transmitted via the Slovak leader. Yet precisely such an approach legitimizes Fico’s trip to Russia for the Victory Day celebrations, with Brussels’ silent consent.

Glitch-art diplomacy and Europe’s binary code

It is customary to think that the relatively good relations which exist between Slovakia and Russia are grounded in pragmatism and cheap energy prices. But today’s reality is deeper. Slovaks are warmer and more rational than their neighbors in the Visegrád region. Having always played second fiddle in the history of great empires and middle states – Austria-Hungary and Czechoslovakia – they learned clearly that ideology is expensive, while survival requires intelligence and flexibility. This understanding enables Slovakia to find ways to make lemonade out of lemons. It should be noted that this brings results: a country which, because of its geographic position, historical circumstances, and energy problems, could be considered an outsider in European politics, is becoming its cyberpunk.

In cyberpunk, life unfolds simultaneously in two incompatible realities according to the principle of “Low Life, High Tech,” using system errors that ultimately form glitch art – the art of digital interference. Its expressive means are bugs, noise, and wave distortions of the image. Thus, glitch-art diplomacy can be described as the foreign policy of a state that is consciously or forcibly built on protocol violations, unpredictability, and the use of systemic errors. In other words, if classical diplomacy is the polished skill of negotiations and playing by the rules, then “glitch diplomacy” is the aesthetics of apparent chaos, behind which stands a thoughtful, if simple, system.

It is precisely in this way that the foreign policy of modern Slovakia should be viewed. In the eyes of the nation, Robert Fico is a hero who breaks the binary European logic of ‘friend/enemy’ by building a bridge between West and East. In Russian discourse, it is emphasized that most European countries have ‘lost their agency’ by adhering to the shared algorithms of Brussels and Washington. Slovakia, by contrast, is capable of acting outside these algorithms, which is regarded as constructive pragmatism.

In the EU’s binary coordinate system, Slovakia is viewed more as its own systemic error. Since it is one of ‘theirs’, it can be corrected and managed. This is precisely the message Fico will voice in Moscow – and no matter how ultimatum-like or harsh it may be – this makes the Slovak leader’s policy acceptable to Brussels. In this way, Slovakia remains a small but critically important node through which East and West continue to exchange signals.