Slovakia threatens to cut emergency power exports to Ukraine

Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico has threatened to cut emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine unless Russian oil resumes flowing to Slovakia through the Druzhba pipeline, according to Infobae citing Reuters and other reports.

The pipeline disruption dates to 27 January, after what Ukrainian officials described as Russian drone strikes damaged infrastructure in western Ukraine. Druzhba is one of the last major conduits for Russian crude into Central Europe; Slovakia and Hungary remain the EU’s most exposed holdouts after most member states reduced purchases following Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Fico’s threat targets a real vulnerability. Ukraine’s grid has been battered by repeated Russian attacks, leaving it reliant on imports from neighbours to manage winter peak demand and outages. Infobae reports Slovakia accounted for roughly 17–18% of Ukraine’s electricity imports last month, while Hungary supplied about 45%.

Fico is converting interdependence into leverage: if Kyiv can impose costs on Bratislava by allowing a supply bottleneck to persist, Bratislava can impose costs on Kyiv by withdrawing a marginal but crucial stabiliser for its power system. In a bloc that talks about “solidarity” as if it were a moral constant, this is what solidarity looks like once it is priced.

The episode also exposes how Europe’s sanctions regime has created a two-tier energy map. Countries that spent years building alternatives can afford moral clarity; landlocked states tied into Soviet-era infrastructure face immediate physical constraints. When the EU’s policy line is set centrally but the costs land locally, national leaders have incentives to create veto points—blocking packages, delaying votes, or, as here, threatening to switch off support.

Budapest has echoed Fico’s stance. Prime minister Viktor Orbán warned that if Hungary stops supplying electricity, Ukraine could face “serious problems,” Infobae reports. The two governments have also used the dispute to justify blocking an EU loan package for Ukraine, effectively bundling unrelated issues into a single negotiation.

Croatia, meanwhile, has refused requests to route additional volumes via the Adria pipeline, underscoring that ‘alternative routes’ are not simply spare capacity waiting to be activated—they are scarce assets with owners who can charge, ration, or refuse.

What looks like an energy squabble is therefore a preview of the EU’s next phase: a coalition war over infrastructure chokepoints, where every cable, pipeline and interconnector becomes a bargaining chip. For Ukraine, dependence on emergency imports is not just an engineering problem—it is a political liability that neighbours can monetize when their own costs rise.