I cannot fathom how Slovakians arrive at the conclusion that sucking up to Russia is in any way in their best interest?

I bet there's a lot of Russian propaganda behind it, but how does reality not beat propaganda? It's like a nation of 25+% anti-vaxxers!

As usual CNN is making out of this a bigger deal than it actually is. These are slovak parliamentaries, so it's not FPTP, therefore he didn't "win" ( yet, anyway ). This seems to be just the social-democratic party's growth from 19% in the last election to 23%, which would be in trend with growing conservative sentiment in europe. Besides, PS also grew from 8% to 18%, but that doesn't generate as many clicks as "SLOVAKIA IS NOW PRO-RUSSIA!" so it's barely a sidenote. Key takeaways are that they will have to seek coalition if they really want to pose a challenge to NATO policies.

Russian bots do a lot of damage. I see it in my own country Slovenia. All the biggest public forums are overrun by extreme pro Russian sentiment. Any reasonable debate is out of the question. It creates a bubble for radicalising people, especially young people that need a reason to rebel against the government, the west and EU.

Honestly, I don't understand why this happens

shit.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A party headed by a pro-Kremlin figure came out top after securing more votes than expected in an election in Slovakia, preliminary results show, in what could pose a challenge to NATO and EU unity on Ukraine.

According to preliminary results released by Slovakia’s Statistical Office at 9 a.m. local time, Robert Fico’s populist SMER party won 22.9% of the vote.

Fico, a two-time former prime minister, now has a chance to regain the job but must first seek coalition partners as his party did not secure a big enough share of the vote to govern on its own.

Slovakia, an eastern European nation of about 5.5 million people, was going to the polls to choose its fifth prime minister in four years after seeing a series of shaky coalition governments.

If Poland’s governing Law and Justice party manages to win a third term in Polish parliamentary elections next month, this bloc of EU troublemakers could become even stronger.

The campaign was marked by concerns over disinformation, with Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s top digital affairs official, saying in advance the vote would be a “test case” of how effective social media companies have been in countering Russian propaganda in Slovakia.

The original article contains 942 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

EU sanctions will continue until national policy improves.

Not a supporter of the war but just noticed that western media is covering this with a sprinkling of their own propaganda. Just read telegraph's piece on this. They seem to think that nato's expansion is normal and just fine. And they also seem to call the presence of Nazi groups in Ukraine Russian propaganda.

There is clear propaganda war going on on both sides. Anti nato doesn't neccesarily mean pro russia. A lot of western people don't seem to be able to wrap their heads around this.