Today Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy admitted that he had offered €500 million to neighboring Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico. However, he denied Fico’s description that it was to secure Slovakia’s assent for Ukraine to join NATO. Rather, Zelenskyy offered, it was to help Slovakia with increased energy costs, after Ukraine cuts off the natural gas pipeline from Russia: “We offered him solutions regarding potential compensation for Slovaks—the Slovaks specifically—for losses from Russian transit, as well as alternatives for transit—any other gas, not Russian, at the request of the European Commission.”
Regardless of the account of the proffered transaction, Zelenskyy, it seems, was offering money that he didn’t have. It turns out that Zelenskyy was offering some of the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen by Brussels and Washington. Brussels has resisted going beyond the freezing of the assets and grabbing the interest earned, to actually seizing them, due to its concern over damage to the euro and the financial system.
Fico had charged that Zelenskyy, at their meeting last week at the European Commission in Brussels, had refused to reconsider the shutoff of natural gas to Slovakia and made the bribe offer. He called Zelenskyy’s proposals as seeming to be “absurd,” reporting that one proposal was to allow the delivery as long as Russia received no pay, while not explaining how Russia was going to agree to this change. Fico posed to journalists: “What fool will give us gas for free?”
