Author: Vojtěch Berger, HlidaciPes.org
Pro-Russian parties at the head of a state also reduce the credibility of its intelligence services. In recent years this has been demonstrated in practice in Slovakia, Hungary, and Austria, where foreign intelligence agencies have limited the sharing of sensitive information with Austrian partners. Can something similar happen in the Czech Republic as a result of the emerging new government?
“The new government has not yet been appointed, so in general this question is premature. In any case, cooperation with our foreign partners is at an excellent level, and BIS is among the most respected services in Europe. This rests on the enormous trust we have built through our results,” the Czech intelligence service BIS spokesperson Ladislav Šticha said in November 2025.
Examples from the Czech Republic’s immediate neighborhood in recent years, however, show how quickly trust within the international intelligence community can be lost.
Prevent leaks to Russia
When the Freedom Party (FPÖ) – with its strong extremist wing and long-standing friendliness toward Russia – controlled Austria’s Interior Ministry, it carried out a 2018 raid on the headquarters of one of Austria’s intelligence services, the BVT. A court later ruled the raid unlawful, but investigations related to the affair continue to this day.
According to various interpretations and testimony from former BVT employees, the raid was meant to help the Freedom Party find out how much state authorities knew about its contacts with the far right, and also to create an atmosphere of fear within Austria’s security apparatus.
According to the then-head of the BVT extremism unit, a printed document proving contacts between the leader of the police raid and one of the best-known neo-Nazis in the German-speaking world, Gottfried Küssel, “disappeared” during the raid.
Part of the affair also involved suspicions that strictly classified documents may have leaked to Russia – documents that Western intelligence services had shared with Austria’s BVT as part of information exchange. For this reason, foreign partners subsequently cut Austria off from certain sensitive intelligence.
A similar scenario theoretically loomed after the Freedom Party’s victory in last year’s parliamentary elections, but it ultimately failed to form a government.
A problem for Fico and Orbán too
Slovakia also faces a serious reputational problem in the field of intelligence services due to the pro-Russian steps of Robert Fico’s government, according to the investigative portal VSquare. Some intelligence agencies, the website reports, have stopped sharing sensitive materials with their Slovak counterparts since Fico returned to power in 2023.
Slovak governing politicians have long expressed friendly attitudes toward Russia and, unusually frequently for today’s EU standards, have also visited the country.
Robert Fico traveled to Moscow for the anniversary of the end of World War II, MEP Ľuboš Blaha apologized in Russia for “Russophobia in the West”, and Deputy Speaker of Parliament and former police president Tibor Gašpar received repeated applause for his speech to a pro-government audience in Volgograd at a conference attended by Vladimir Putin.
Hungary has also been affected by limits on sharing sensitive intelligence. Viktor Orbán’s government has long sought the best possible relations with both Russia and China. According to available reports, this has resulted in a reduced willingness to share information with Hungary -both among intelligence services and within NATO.
Czech SPD’s pro-Russian contacts
The Czech secret service BIS does not see itself on a similar trajectory: “We do not expect any change, also considering that we have no information indicating that the possible future government is preparing any fundamental changes in the state’s internal security,” BIS spokesperson Šticha added.
Both ANO as the main coalition party and SPD as one of its minor partners continue to reject the “pro-Russian” label. Yet their European alliances – with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Austria’s Freedom Party, and Orbán’s Fidesz – repeatedly produce situations in which the upcoming Czech governing parties tolerate or ignore the pro-Russian orientation of their partners.
HlídacíPes.org has long documented such examples. During 2025 October’s parliamentary elections, ANO allowed a reporter from the strongly pro-Russian German magazine Compact into its campaign headquarters. Compact issued, for example, commemorative medals featuring Vladimir Putin and recently faced potential legal banning in Germany due to extremism. According to ANO, the journalist entered the event by mistake. The same reporter, incidentally, was also present at Okamura’s SPD headquarters during the elections.
SPD has long cultivated contacts with the youth wing of Germany’s AfD, which German counter-intelligence officially considers an extremist organization. The Junge Alternative dissolved itself this year for that reason, but AfD is now preparing to restart it under a different name and structure, though with similar personnel.
At the inaugural meeting of the new Czech Chamber of Deputies, SPD again boasted of hosting two regional AfD politicians from Germany. One of them, Damian Lohr, was a long-time chair of the national Junge Alternative.
SPD’s key link to Germany is AfD MEP Petr Bystroň, a Czech-born politician currently under investigation for allegedly accepting bribes from Russia and laundering money. For this reason, the European Parliament lifted his immunity in May. He denies the accusations and describes the case as political persecution.
