Karmen Švegl, a correspondent for RTV Slovenia from the war zone in Ukraine, spoke in an interview with the newspaper Delo on Sunday about the visit of Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša and two other European Prime Ministers, Polish Morawiecki and Czech Fialo, to besieged Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Švegl, with whom Janša also spoke in person over the phone when he was on his way to Kyiv, spoke about the intelligence of some Slovene left-wing politicians and their media, that the visit was risky and that they risked direct NATO conflict with Russia. As well as the fact that Slovenians who are not burdened by domestic politics have received the trip to Kyiv extremely positively.
War correspondent Karmen Švegl has been monitoring and reporting on the armed conflict in Ukraine for several weeks, directly from the war. For her, the visit of the three Prime Ministers of European countries to besieged Kyiv was not something new, as she had experienced in the past how, for example, American leaders came to Afghanistan, but journalists did not know that until they landed there.
“It was different here. They announced that they had crossed the border, and I am sure they had also given the Russians in advance the coordinates of where they would travel. They wanted to make it clear that if they attacked this train, they attacked it not by mistake, but for a reason, and that would risk a conflict with NATO,” explains Švegl in a Sunday interview for Delo newspaper. She believes that the trip of the three Prime Ministers to Kyiv cannot therefore be described as a secret action, as, in her words, “some in Slovenia were smart”. Everyone always knew where the Prime Ministers were, for example, the Poles kept announcing this.
In an interview, Švegl revealed that she received at least 40 messages that day from Ukrainians she met, as well as other journalists, from Denmark to Poland and France, who all saw this visit as a big gesture. “A girl from Kyiv wrote to me: You can be happy to live in a country where the Prime Minister is willing to risk his life for the people of another country. People really accepted this as a great gesture of support,” said the war correspondent, for whom Janez Janša said in an interview with Odmevi with Tanja Starič last week that she was extremely brave and that she risked much more than he did.
Švegl understands that from the Slovenian perspective it may be different for some, but according to her, people who are not burdened by domestic politics experienced this gesture (Janša’s trip to Kyiv) as “absolutely positive”.
T.F.
