Slovenia president denies Russian intelligence ties

Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar has denied links with Russian intelligence amid political controversy after she was involved in a traffic accident alongside a friend alleged in media reports to have ties to Moscow.

“We strongly deny that the president collaborates with Russian intelligence networks,” Pirc Musar's office said Tuesday.

The office said Pirc Musar was hospitalised with a broken collarbone after the late July accident and that her official car was also carrying two passengers who were friends of the president.

Local media reported that one passenger was Viktorija Krivolucka, a longtime friend of Pirc Musar who is originally from Russia and obtained Slovenian nationality in 2016. The reports said Krivolucka and Pirc Musar had been friends for years and had visited Russia together several times before Pirc Musar became president in 2022.

Slovenian daily Dnevnik and Austrian news agency APA reported Monday that Krivolucka had close ties with Roman Jeglic, a former Slovenian intelligence official who fled to Russia in the mid-1990s.

In a statement to the private POP TV channel, Krivolucka confirmed she had lived with Jeglic in Russia for “several years” after he left Slovenia, but said she had not been in touch with him for 15 years.

The Slovenian Democratic Party has called on the government to ban Pirc Musar from access to intelligence reports, claiming she may be linked to Russian intelligence networks. The president's office denied that Krivolucka had any links to Russian intelligence and said she would have been vetted before being granted Slovenian citizenship.

Pirc Musar was elected president as an independent candidate in 2022 and is generally seen as liberal and pro-European. She has often criticised Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.