Slovenia has been drawn into an extraordinary political and intelligence controversy after allegations of possible Russian connections reached the office of President Nataša Pirc Musar.

The allegations are serious enough that Žan Mahnič, an MP from the ruling Slovenian Democratic Party, has called on the government to stop supplying intelligence and security reports to the president and her office. Mahnič says there are grounds to investigate whether Pirc Musar could be connected to a Russian intelligence network.

The president categorically denies the allegation.

At the centre of the affair is not Pirc Musar herself, but one of her closest and longest-standing friends, Viktorija Krivolucka, a Russian-born Slovenian citizen.

Krivolucka came under public scrutiny after she was travelling with Pirc Musar when the presidential vehicle was involved in an accident in the Kastelec tunnel on July 31. The apparently ordinary detail of who was travelling with the president subsequently opened a much larger investigation into Krivolucka’s background and her connections with Russia.

An investigation by the Slovenian newspaper Dnevnik and Austria’s APA news agency found that Krivolucka had previously been in a relationship with Roman Jeglič, a former senior Slovenian intelligence official. Records examined by the journalists reportedly showed Krivolucka and Jeglič registered at the same address in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, in 2009.

Jeglič is an intriguing figure in Slovenia’s post-communist history. Between 1991 and 1993, he served as deputy director of the Security-Information Service, or VIS, the predecessor of the present Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency.

His history stretches even further back. While heading a crime-suppression unit in the Ljubljana police, Jeglič signed the 1988 criminal complaint that resulted in the arrest of Janez Janša, now Slovenia’s prime minister, during the famous JBTZ affair. The arrests helped trigger the Slovenian Spring and became part of the political upheaval that preceded the country’s independence from Yugoslavia.

Jeglič subsequently moved to Russia in the 1990s and largely disappeared from Slovenian public life.

There is, importantly, no publicly disclosed evidence establishing that Jeglič worked for Russian intelligence. The databases examined by Dnevnik and APA reportedly contained no direct evidence connecting him to Russian intelligence services. This distinction is crucial given the gravity of the allegations now being made against the president.

Krivolucka has confirmed that she and Jeglič were once a couple but says she did not know about his intelligence background at the time and has had no contact with him for at least 15 years.

The connection nevertheless becomes politically sensitive because of Pirc Musar’s own friendship with Krivolucka.

According to the media investigation, Pirc Musar and Krivolucka appeared together on passenger records on at least seven occasions beginning in 2015. Pirc Musar’s last reported private visit to Russia was to Moscow for New Year 2022, less than two months before Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

None of this proves espionage. Travelling to Russia before the invasion was neither illegal nor particularly unusual, and friendship with a Russian-born citizen is obviously not evidence of intelligence activity.

But for the president of a NATO and European Union member state, the question is different. It concerns whether personal relationships might create counterintelligence vulnerabilities, particularly for an official who receives sensitive national security information.

Mahnič has therefore asked that Slovenia’s intelligence agency SOVA, the Defence Ministry’s Intelligence and Security Service and other state bodies stop providing intelligence reports to the presidency while the issue is examined.

He has also called for a wider assessment of the rules governing access to classified information.

Pirc Musar’s office has responded forcefully, saying that she has never met Jeglič and does not know him personally. It has described suggestions that the president is cooperating with a Russian intelligence network as false.

There is another significant fact in her defence. Slovenian intelligence reportedly found no security concerns concerning Krivolucka when she underwent vetting connected with obtaining Slovenian citizenship in 2016.

The controversy is nevertheless unlikely to disappear quickly because it combines several of the most sensitive elements of Slovenian politics: Russia, intelligence services, the country’s communist and Yugoslav past, and the bitter rivalry surrounding Janez Janša.

It also comes at a particularly awkward moment for Slovenia.

The country has already experienced a genuine Russian espionage case. In 2022 Slovenian authorities arrested Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, Russian intelligence operatives living near Ljubljana under Argentine identities. They pleaded guilty to espionage charges in 2024 and were subsequently included in the major prisoner exchange between Russia and Western countries.

Slovenia therefore knows that Russian intelligence operations on its territory are not hypothetical.

The Pirc Musar controversy is fundamentally different. No evidence currently in the public domain demonstrates that the Slovenian president is a Russian agent, has knowingly cooperated with Russian intelligence or has passed classified information to Moscow.

What exists instead is a chain of relationships that her political opponents believe deserves investigation: the president’s long friendship with a Russian-born woman, that woman’s former relationship with a former senior Slovenian intelligence officer who moved to Russia, and the president’s own history of private travel to Russia.

That is enough to create a political storm, but not enough to establish espionage.

The distinction matters.

If evidence emerges that a NATO head of state was compromised by Russian intelligence, the consequences would extend far beyond Ljubljana. It would raise questions about the handling of classified information and Slovenia’s relationships with NATO and EU partners.

If no such evidence emerges, however, accusing an elected head of state of collaboration with a foreign intelligence service would itself represent an extraordinary escalation in Slovenia’s increasingly bitter domestic politics.

For the moment, Slovenia has a Russian intelligence controversy surrounding its president. It does not have proof of a Russian spy in the presidential palace.

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