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West may sacrifice Ukraine using its 1938 playbook for Czechoslovakia — Slovak PM

According to Robert Fico, Slovakia has no complaints with the authorities in Kiev, but Bratislava recognizes that Ukraine has fallen victim to Western ambitions to weaken Russia

BUENOS AIRES, December 12. /TASS/. The West may sacrifice Ukraine and divide it into parts, as it did to Czechoslovakia in 1938, after being defeated by Russia, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said.

"A time will come when the West will say: 'Well, we failed [to defeat Russia], therefore we will sacrifice Ukraine,'" he stated in an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo while on an official visit to Brasilia. He recounted that in 1938, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and France signed the Munich Agreement, under which Czechoslovakia surrendered its border regions to Nazi Germany, adding: "A similar fate may await Ukraine, I am afraid."

According to him, Slovakia has no complaints with the authorities in Kiev, but Bratislava recognizes that Ukraine has fallen victim to Western ambitions to weaken Russia. "We are not angry with Ukraine, we just say that it allowed itself to be drawn into something negative by the West," the Slovak prime minister explained.

At a meeting with the Foreign Ministry on June 14, Putin set out the country’s conditions for resolving the situation in Ukraine. Among them are the withdrawal of the Ukrainian armed forces from Donbass and Novorossiya and Kiev's refusal to join NATO. In addition, Russia wants all Western sanctions against it lifted and demands that Ukraine commit to a non-aligned and nuclear-free status. The rights, freedoms, and interests of its Russian-speaking population need to be ensured, too.

On December 8, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed that Moscow was open to talks on Ukraine. However, in order to move toward peace, it would be enough for Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to revoke his decree banning any talks with Russia and instruct to resume dialogue based on the Istanbul agreements, while considering the actual situation on the ground.