Blue, white and red form the Pan-Slavic colours, adopted by Slavic nations across Europe as a symbol of shared cultural identity.
This one traces back to an oddly specific moment: Peter the Great, touring the Netherlands in the 1690s under a fake name so he could study Dutch shipbuilding without the fuss of a royal visit, brought the Dutch flag home with him as a template for Russia's own. He kept the same three colours and rearranged the stripe order, and that became the flag of the Russian Empire.
It's the same Dutch flag that shows up behind the red-white-blue palette in general, the two guides overlap here because they really do share the same root. What makes the Slavic story its own thing is what happened next, more than a century later.
In 1848, a wave of revolutions was sweeping across Europe, and a Slavic Congress convened in Prague specifically to build some sense of shared identity among Slavic peoples who were, at the time, scattered across the Austrian, Ottoman and Russian empires with no state of their own. They looked at Russia's flag, the largest and most powerful Slavic nation by far, and formally adopted its blue, white and red as shared colours for Slavic identity generally, a way of saying "we belong to the same broader family," even for peoples who had no political unity and wouldn't for decades, in some cases a full century.
When Slavic nations did eventually get their own flags through the 19th and 20th centuries, independence from the Ottomans, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the breakup of Yugoslavia much later, many reached back for that same blue-white-red combination, not because they copied each other directly but because the Congress had already made the palette mean something bigger than any one country.
Blue, white and red together is genuinely common worldwide, so on its own this palette isn't a strong single clue. Combined with a European-sounding population or size hint, though, it narrows things down fast.
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