ONLY ONE day after his inauguration, President Andrej Kiska set off for his first official foreign trip to attend a meeting of the Visegrad Group (V4) presidents and the president of Germany in Budapest on July 16.
Kiska met with Czech President Miloš Zeman, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, German President Joachim Gauck, and the host of the meeting, Hungarian President János Áder.
Kiska agreed in his talks with Áder and Komorowski on the necessity to help Ukraine.
“We have expressed great will to help Ukraine so that it gets out of this unpleasant situation, because all of our countries want Ukraine to join our part of Europe,” Kiska told the journalists following the official talks, as quoted by the TASR newswire, adding that this is particularly important for those countries that border Ukraine.
The presidents also discussed the halting of gas supplies from Ukraine, TASR wrote.
With this being the first time Kiska met with his Hungarian counterpart, the two partners discussed the situation of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia.
“I have repeated that it is one of the basic conditions towards making our relations very good and at a high level for politicians on either side to stop provoking unnecessary tension during pre-election activities,” Kiska said, as quoted by TASR.
As part of the official programme, the five heads of state marked the 25th anniversary of the reburial of Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy, who was executed in 1958 under the communist regime. The presidents also visited the House of Terror Museum and had a working lunch, the SITA newswire reported.
Kiska will pay his first official bilateral visit to the Czech Republic in July, in keeping with the tradition between the two countries. His next visit after that is planned for Poland. He also discussed the possibilities of meeting informally with the Polish president at the border between the two countries, Sme wrote.
