Here were the key points, about the Slovak leadrer, I noticed in the article you supplied the link for:
“But in 2018, he [Fico] was forced to resign in disgrace after the assassination of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova led to countrywide protests against his governing Smer party and its perceived ties to corrupt oligarchs.”
“Fico threatened to cut state advertising to independent television networks and threatened their parent companies with ineligibility for state contracts – tactics that have gutted independent media in neighbouring Hungary.”
“On the day he was shot, parliament was scheduled to vote on a law restructuring state broadcaster RTS to give the government more direct control over it.”
Fico also got rid of a special prosecutors office that was looking into a ton of corruption cases.
What is similar about many eastern European countries and Russia is the economic dominance of oligarchs, which is a vestige of how political power moved quickly into personal financial power in all the former Soviet Soviet-alligned states with no dominant history of real capitalism and free markets. The oligarchs - all of them - begin with some vestiage of political or bureaucratic power-position and from it gain financial power for themselves, to the point where THAT - oligarch power - becomes power itself.
Russia is bereft of it as is Ukraine and many others.
It sounds like they/he wanted to inplement a China type of mind/communications control.