Former Slovakian Justice Minister Stefan Harabin has been charged with welcoming Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, the prosecutor’s office said Monday.

Harabin, who was also president of Slovakia’s Supreme Court, wrote on Facebook the day after the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, that he “would do the same as (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.”

He was accused of “slandering the country and the people”, as well as the fact that he apologized for the crime,” Zuzana Drobova, spokeswoman for the Prosecutor’s Office of Slovakia, emphasized.

Harabin faces up to three years in prison, Dennik N newspaper reports.

The former minister said on Monday that he was “proud” of his statement, which he says is convinced that Russia acted in accordance with international law, the newspaper reported.

The 66-year-old former communist Harabin also said in an interview broadcast by the YouTube channel that Russia “is obliged to eliminate all Ukrainian Nazis responsible for the murder of 14,000 children, women and the elderly in Donbas, starting in 2014.” .

A staunch critic of the EU, he served as justice minister in the populist government of Prime Minister Robert Fizo (2006-2009) and was chief justice of the Supreme Court before running unsuccessfully for the 2019 presidential election.

Slovakia, an EU member state with a population of 5.4 million people, provided significant humanitarian and military aid to Kyiv following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In late March, Slovakia announced that it had received an arms offer worth more than $1 billion from the United States at a discounted price in exchange for 13 MiG-29 fighter jets promised to Ukraine.

Follow the latest events of the 468th day of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HOTNEWS.RO.