KYIV (Reuters) – Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal began talks on Monday with Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico which he said would focus on infrastructure cooperation, energy security and support for Kyiv’s peace plan.
Fico has been a big critic of Western military aid to Ukraine along with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. It was not immediately clear where the talks were taking place.
“(We) will focus on discussing the roadmap… This includes cooperation in infrastructure projects, the economy, and energy security. A significant part of Ukraine’s electricity imports comes from Slovakia, which has never refused to help,” Shmyhal said on Telegram messenger.
Fico, who has made a big show of halting government-sponsored military aid to Ukraine while allowing commercial supplies to continue, reiterated his view that there was no military solution to the Ukrainian-Russian war.
“We wish you the fastest possible peace and we mean it seriously,” Fico said.
“Peace must be sustainable, you have to have security guarantees. Above all, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine must be respected. We understand all that.”
Slovakia, a member of NATO and the EU which shares a border with Ukraine, opposes Kyiv’s accession to NATO, but has a strong interest in maintaining the transit of oil and gas from Russia to the west via Ukraine.
Slovak state-owned gas buyer SPP said this month it was continuing negotiations to secure an extension of gas transit through Ukraine after Kyiv’s contract with Russian supplier Gazprom expires at the end of the year.
Ukraine has repeatedly said it does not want to renew the transit deal but central European countries rely on Russian gas delivered through pipelines that cross the country.
Tensions between the two countries arose this year when Kyiv imposed sanctions on Russian oil company Lukoil, which supplied oil to Slovak oil refineries.
The issue was later resolved and oil transit was restored.
(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko, Pavel Polityuk, Jan Lopatka and Jason Hovet; Editing by Gareth Jones and Ed Osmond)
