Let’s rewind the clock and go back in time to 2009. When Fico was Prime Minister (see, he has done this before, it’s not his first rodeo).
The is the winter of discontent. The year is 2009. Slovaks are shivering with cold. The delicious, warming Russian natural gas has ceased to transit into Slovakia via Ukraine. Factories are forced to shut down. This cutting off of Russian gas has cost the Slovak economy around 100 million Euros per day. A desperate Prime Minister Fico gets on the horn and phones Vladimir Putin, who is, at the time, the Prime Minister of Russia. They turn it into a conference call and loop in the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Julia Tymoshenko. Three Prime Ministers all on one call.
January 14, 2009. A Slovak delegation, headed by Fico, flies to Kiev to meet with Tymoshenko.
They are not met by a red carpet and marching band. Instead, rude Ukrainians force the Slovak delegation to wait 3 hours at the airport before anybody even bothers to come and pick them up.
Finally walking into what they think is going to be a closed meeting, the Slovaks discover that they are walking into a press conference teeming with paparazzi. Under the lights of a hundred cameras, Tymoshenko spends the next 20 minutes scolding Fico for allegedly taking Russia’s side in this gas war. Fico is so livid that he literally turns red with anger. “He was humiliated,” a high-ranking (but anonymous) Slovak official from that era, confided to Politico.
After this disaster, the Slovak delegation proceeded to fly to Moscow, where the reception could not have been more different: They were greeted as honored guests, and Putin even met with them in a triumphant ceremony inside the lavish Saint George Hall of the Kremlin. According to Alexander Duleba, an important Slovak political analyst, “It was after this incident that Fico began to conduct an openly anti-Ukrainian position. He would say things like, We don’t need to support Ukraine, Ukraine doesn’t need us, and they will never conduct meaningful talks with us. It’s personal with him.”
But Fico wasn’t the only Slovak being humiliated by Ukrainians. Two days after his unsuccessful trip to Kiev, namely on January 16, the Slovak President, Ivan Gašparovič, thought he would take a stab at fixing this problem; so he too flew to Kiev, in this case to meet with his own peer, President Viktor Yushchenko. Viktor was nicer than Julia, and he promised Ivan that Ukrainian NaftoGaz company would resume transit of gas into Slovakia. So, people wouldn’t have to huddle around their cold dead radiators, praying for warmth. Unfortunately, Yushchenko lied. Or rather, was overruled, by the head of NaftoGaz himself, who walked into the room and said “No gas for you.” The Politico reporter’s anonymous source concluded philosophically: “And so it befell the Ukrainians to humiliate both the Prime Minister and also the President of Slovakia.”
Moral of the story: Just like you learned in kindergarten: If you are nice to other people, then they will be nice back to you. And if the other way, then … the other way.