The Truth party (Resni.ca) was founded on a wave of pandemic discontent, as people across Europe became increasingly violent over the recovered/vaccinated/tested (RVT) condition. Just like the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda), the Resni.ca party also promised “freedom” from the RVT measures, regardless of what medical science experts might think about that. The party’s chairman, Zoran Stevanović, who has now decided he will try and score a job post in Brussels, was one of the central figures in the protests that turned into violent marches through Ljubljana, with people occupying the city’s main roadways and even the motorway, overturning rubbish bins, beating passers-by and journalists, stopping news vans, and clashing with the police. Who was the sponsor of such violent engagement against the former government of Janez Janša?
Now that the indications of cooperation between the Resni.ca party and the Russian Federation are becoming more apparent, the question arises as to who set up the powerful toxic network on social networks that made the crowds gather first in the middle of Ljubljana and later in the streets of Ljubljana.
We recently saw a candidate for the position of Member of the European Parliament from the Resni.ca party, Bojan Potočnik, bid an emotional farewell to a Russian spy posing as a diplomat. Also on the party’s list of candidates for the upcoming elections to the European Parliament is journalist Polona Frelih, who often spreads pro-Russian views on the social network X.
It should also be noted that the Resni.ca party’s president, Zoran Stevanović, has in the past caused quite a stir by visiting the Russian embassy just a few months after Vladimir Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine started, where he spread Kremlin agitprop about the overpaid Russian gas.
Who financed the Slovenian protests?
The party’s main focus during the pandemic was agitation against the measures adopted to stop the spread of Covid-19, and it drew a whole bunch of Covid sceptics and anti-vaxxers, who – statistically, this is well correlated – are also supporters of Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian regime.
So, an interesting question arises here – did the Russian state finance the emerging Russophile political entity? In this respect, the Resni.ca party is just one face of a many-headed hydra of parties riding on the wave of Covid-19 discontent. The other was the victorious Freedom Movement – we have already written about how Robert Golob, in the typical Kučan fashion, equated Ukraine defending itself with occupying Russia, saying that neither side wanted to give up.
In addition, Miroslav Gregorič, a member of the Freedom Movement party, has repeatedly shared pro-Kremlin views on social media following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – we have previously already reported on that.
But Resni.ca is the only party that still openly flirts with the Russian Federation today – it seems to be counting on the fact that its voters are mostly Putin supporters, too, and they are probably not wrong about that.
The Russians have a rich history of provoking protests in Europe
The Paris Le Monde has discovered that many protests in the European Union are financed and even coordinated by Russian intelligence services. Internal Russian intelligence documents obtained by Le Monde and its partners show that such protests were orchestrated by Russia on several occasions. Thus, on the 11th of February 2023, the Place de la République in Paris was packed. Thousands of protesters gathered there to protest against the pension reform. But three men stood out in the crowd. One of them was holding a sign that read: “EU [European Union], America, stop financing the war in Ukraine”.
Less than a month later, on the 5th of March 2023, the same man stood on Place Saint-Pierre in the Montmartre neighbourhood of Paris’ 18th arrondissement. This time, he performed the Nazi salute in front of banners bearing the Ukrainian flag. The banners read, “Erdogan, the earthquake is retaliation for Russian tourists.” As with their first demonstration, the moment was caught on camera and then posted on social media platforms, including Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
Le Monde has recorded many more similar demonstrations in European capitals. Each time, the message being spread was intended to discredit Ukraine, the European Union and Turkey. Le Monde found the same pseudo-demonstrators and the same types of posts on social media. And Russian intelligence services were behind the operation.
Were the anti-RVT protests in Slovenia orchestrated by Russian intelligence?
Belgian, German, and Dutch intelligence services have already hinted that both the anti-Covid-19 and the current farmers’ protests in Europe were financed and instigated by Russian intelligence services such as the Federal Security Service – FSB, the Federal Protective Service – FSO and the Foreign Intelligence Service – SVR.
It is also important to note that the main creators of the left-wing political parties in Slovenia (headed by the former Presidents of the Republic Milan Kučan and Danilo Türk) have in the past been very sympathetic to Russia, which, in the Bolshevik tradition, they have always experienced as the mother nation of the socialist collectivists (the myth of “Mother Russia”).
Having established that one of the political parties in Slovenia – which is actively depriving the right of voters, which is why the left lets it live – is actively flirting with Russian imperialism, it is reasonable to ask whether the Slovenian protests were also, at least in part, orchestrated Russian propaganda.
I. K.
