“This group of pro-Putin people actually represents the Slovenian deep state. They are powerful because they control vast parts of the mainstream media, the judiciary, the Supreme Court, the police, universities, and state-owned companies. They control the Slovenian government, too,” Janša warned his colleagues from NATO.
The President of the largest opposition party, Janez Janša, has drawn the attention of his NATO colleagues to the new public letter that was written by Milan Kučan & Co., the tone of which is strongly pro-Russian. In it, the co-signatories, among other things, scare with talk Russian nuclear weapons, a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, and actually agree to disarm the victim: “The heavy offensive tanks on the Ukrainian-Russian front further open the danger of a direct confrontation between Russia and the West on our own European soil. The speculation of military experts that a nuclear war is unlikely to take place is no guarantee of security.”
This is a story we already know very well – from 1991. In his warning, Janša goes on to say that among the co-signatories of the pro-Putin pamphlet, one can also find representatives of the National Assembly from the largest government party, the Freedom Movement – “Gibanje Svoboda” (Miroslav Gregorič), and influential members of the Social Democrats (Socialni Demokrati – SD) and the Left party (Levica). Finally, Janša also highlights “Putin’s old friends” with their bloody decorations that they got from Russia (Zoran Janković and Kučan). He also warns his NATO colleagues about the powerful Russian intelligence network in Slovenia and calls on them to take appropriate action. You can read the full letter from Kučan & Co. here.
Oleksandr Levchenko, the former Ukrainian ambassador to Croatia, has already warned some time ago that Ljubljana is a hotbed of Russian informers. The hotbed of informers is said to be active throughout the former Yugoslavia and beyond, with the Russian embassy in Slovenia playing a key role. Moscow has decided that it is very important for it to keep a constant watch on the pulse of events, to control the process of the Western Balkan countries’ obtaining their membership in European and Euro-Atlantic structures, and to keep everything under strict intelligence control.
A “ceasefire” means giving Russia time to mobilise more people and to produce or purchase new weapons!
Levchenko went on to say that they had already warned some time ago that Moscow would engage its followers in Europe, who would highlight the urgent need to sign a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. In his recent interviews, Jacek Bartosiak, a leading Polish geopolitician, warns of the very danger lurking behind the logic of Kučan & Co. The fact is that in the event of “some kind of ceasefire,” Russia would not stop, but would use the time to mobilise new forces and replenish its missing stockpiles of weapons with the help of its partners (Iran, North Korea, etc.). And it has a huge population pool … It also has a higher number of weapons, but Ukraine has newer, Western weapons.
Russia’s key objective is to remain a decision-maker, both in Central-Eastern Europe and more broadly on the continent. To become once again an empire to be reckoned with, it needs Ukraine … ( … and possibly also Moldova, the Baltic States, etc.) If Russia forces the “ceasefire” it so desperately wants to happen, it will also want to reckon in the future with Poland, which is key to the delivery of Polish and Western arms. Poland is also Russia’s biggest (historical) geostrategic competitor in the area, and the fates of Ukraine and Poland in this war are closely interlinked, even intertwined. If Ukraine wins, the Poles win “at the hands of the Ukrainians” and vice versa, and Europe can potentially count on a more lasting peace and the preservation of democracy… Fortunately, there is also NATO…
Let there be no repeat of the Budapest Memorandum …
The key for Poland is to weaken Russia as much as possible, possibly to continue to break up into republics, which would dispel the dreams of the elite in Moscow and bring a more lasting peace to the continent … So that the story of the end of the Soviet Union continues, with the creation of new states … But victory in the war is also crucial for the survivors of the Kremlin regime … We need to ask ourselves whether we want a greater evil – a “rotten truce” that would only make the situation worse in the long run? If not, then Ukraine must be supplied with the heavy weapons it desperately needs to win. The alternative is a ceasefire with ‘steel’ military guarantees from the US and NATO, not a new Budapest Memorandum, which has failed miserably. But the current “steel” guarantees are not (yet) on the table… The limited engagement of the West is partly explained by expediency (France, Germany) and partly by fear of the unintended consequences of defeat and the possible break-up of Russia (USA).
Domen Mezeg
