We can be a bridge between the European Union and Azerbaijan. We are here to present to the European Union an objective picture of the situation in Azerbaijan, – stated the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fizo, after negotiations with the President of Azerbaijan, first face to face, and then with delegations. On the eve of that visit, information was spread in the international press that Slovakia will sell “seventy units of self-propelled artillery” to Azerbaijan. At the press conference with the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Ilham Aliyev announced that an “agreement on military and joint industrial cooperation” was signed between the parties.
Slovakia and Azerbaijan will embark on the organization of joint industrial production. Slovakia has taken over the maintenance of the reconstruction of Bash-Garvend village in Aghdam region. As Ilham Aliyev put it, we are talking about the construction of the so-called “smart village”. It is not excluded that this will also start the cooperation of the two countries in the field of race industry. It is noteworthy that on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the Prime Minister of Slovakia made a special statement, where he considered the “insolence of the Ukrainian fascism” and “the eastward expansion of NATO” as the cause of the crisis.
Robert Fizo, as documented by open sources, started his political activity as a member of the communist party of Czechoslovakia, which was still a united country, and then headed the Slovak “Democratic Left” party. In the end, he ended up in the camp of left-nationalists and founded the “Correctness: Social Democracy” party. He assumed the position of the Prime Minister of Slovakia for the third time last November 25. He has sharp political differences with the President of Slovakia. The latter criticizes the Prime Minister for “attempting to limit liberalism and adopting a pro-Russian foreign policy”.
Actually, in the face of Slovakia, Azerbaijan gained the second ally in the process of dialogue with the European Union, after Hungarian Prime Minister Orban. Robert Fitzo’s hint that he will present an objective image of Azerbaijan in the European Union is support for Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarianism. As for the cooperation in the field of military and nuclear industry, Slovakia is not the only one. Azerbaijan has also signed similar agreements with Italy and Serbia, which, although it is not a member of the EU, is not at all a secondary actor in the political life of Europe.
It turns out that Russia’s “political resource” in Europe, in the form of Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, and to a certain extent Italy, is also “Azerbaijani”. Who is driving the process? Perhaps it would be correct to assume that Moscow and Baku complement each other in their relations with these countries. The two main partners of Azerbaijan in the field of armaments, Russia and Israel, are at war, and they cannot fulfill Azerbaijan’s demands at least at this stage. Serbia, Italy and Slovenia come to help.
As for why Ilham Aliyev, who publicly campaigned to exclude a new war in the South Caucasus, acquires offensive weapons, and Moscow does not in any way address this policy of regional militarization, it remains to guess what role Azerbaijan is preparing for. It’s quite a difficult task. It would be simplistic to judge that Baku spends about four billion dollars a year in net military expenditures, one and a half of which is only to develop the razo-industrial complex, in order to fight against Armenia alone.
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