Hungarian Conservative

The European Peace Facility was posed to transfer €500 million to Ukraine for artillery round purchases, but the aid was blocked by the Hungarian government. The official explanation for the move is that Budapest would like to see the off-budget EU fund focus on more than just Ukraine, but some believe the blacklisting of OTP Bank may be behind it.

While talking to reporters on his flight from Budapest to Vatican City, Pope Francis revealed that the Vatican is engaged in a ‘peace mission’, which he has discussed with Prime Minister Orbán and Bishop Hilarion in Budapest. The Kyiv government has made it clear that it does not approve of such an effort.

Four Central European countries, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, have announced bans on foodstuff imports coming from Ukraine. Meanwhile, Romania has joined them in demanding action from the EU to address these concerns. The five countries are estimated to have lost 417 million EUR combined due to cheap Ukrainian food imports.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made a surprise visit to Kyiv, Ukraine to meet with President Zelenskyy, where he expressed his strong support for Ukraine’s accession to the military alliance. Viktor Orbán, who has been a vocal proponent of peace negotiations and is fully aware that such remarks are seen as a provocative move by Russia, took to Twitter to voice his strong dissent.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán emphasised that Budapest and Warsaw will join forces to protect the agricultural workers of Central Europe from the negative effects of ‘grain dumps’ coming from Ukraine.

The Prime Minister said that the rebuilding of Russian-European economic relations after the war would be desirable, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Romania has joined Budapest in criticising some of Kyiv’s policies. Bucharest has raised ecological concerns over Ukraine’s plan to continue to dredge the Danube Delta to increase its volume of trade through the Bystroye Canal.

Worries grow about Moldova’s stability as the second wave of pro-Russian protests erupted in Chișinău and Wizz Air temporarily suspended its flights due to repeated violations of Moldova’s airspace by Russian missiles.

Trans-Dniester in Moldova is considered to be Russia’s next target for invasion by the intelligence communities of multiple countries. Meanwhile, there has been social unrest is the capital city of Chisinau, also suspected to be connected to the Kremlin.

‘We did not set the speech up some kind of head-to-head. This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else,’ underlined US national security adviser Jake Sullivan, stating that Biden’s speech was not planned as a direct rebuttal to Putin.

Anti-government protests, prompted by the soaring energy prices in Moldova, ended in chants of ´we want to be part of Russia!´.

Shortly after the uncovered plot to destabilise Moldova, Russian missiles violated the country’s airspace.

Ambassadors Varga-Haszonits and Fałkowski were the only diplomats to be present at the Tehran event with President Raisi. Despite that, other European nations also refrain from fully committing to cutting ties with the Middle Eastern nation.

It is difficult not to interpret the visit of Samantha Power, the current head of USAID, to Budapest last Thursday and Friday as an American telling-off.

Moldova, the small Eastern European country that has been divided ever since it declared its independence from the USSR in 1991, has now criminalised separatism.

Naftali Bennett made shocking claims about his derailed mediation efforts in the Ukraine conflict in a five-hour interview, uploaded to his own YouTube channel.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal recently stated that the country would like to join the EU in a two-year timetable. However, most member states think that this timeline for Kyiv’s bid is unrealistic.

The actor known for many as Luke Skywalker has been an adamant supporter of Ukraine’s war efforts since the conflict began. Earlier this week Hamill announced that he would soon be selling signed Star Wars posters to help finance the Ukrainian army’s drone supply.

There should be no doubt: images of German tanks making their way across Ukrainian mud to kill Russians would increase the popularity and legitimacy of President Putin’s war.

From Czechia to Ukraine, voters in several countries of Central and Eastern Europe will be going to the polls in 2023.

The Czechs and the Slovaks are growing increasingly dissatisfied with Europe’s sanctions policy that makes families bear the cost of the war.

At an event hosted by Hungarian Conservative, foreign policy expert and journalist Anton Bendarzsevszkij spoke about some less discussed aspects of the protracted conflict in Ukraine.

After Brussels’ deception, Warsaw seems to be siding with Budapest again, and also seeking to revitalise the regional V4 cooperation.

When we think of the scale of suffering the war in Ukraine has been causing worldwide, it is hard to believe that Kyiv all but finalised a peace agreement with Moscow as early as April, less than two months into the war, only to be pressured by the West to drop it. Recent revelations strongly suggest that this might be the case.

As last week Europe’s largest nuclear power plant stopped operating, another case of a large-scale nuclear catastrophe loomed in the air. At the time it was avoided, however, the Zaporizhzhia plant is still threatened by bombings and fighting in the area.

Europe’s largest nuclear plant was temporarily cut off from the power grid on Thursday. Although the catastrophe was avoided this time, experts say a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia plant could be as devastating as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Budapest’s mayor unknowingly participated in a conversation with two Russian comedians, who were pretending to be the mayor of Kyiv. The incident raises some worrying concerns about how much we can trust our eyes in the age of deep fakes.

Although the Visegrád Four may be facing one of the most severe disruptions of its history, it is too early to discount it as a “collateral victim of the war,” as the cooperation’s main virtue has always been its ability to overcome momentary political disputes.

The petrodollar system, as can be seen, is the backbone of US hegemony in the world. And whenever a world leader has seriously challenged the system, the US and its NATO allies have been swift to respond to ensure US global dominance continues.

Spain’s civil war has been widely considered as the ‘dress rehearsal’ of the Second World War, a sort of test-run for the global conflict that followed shortly. Now, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is becoming increasingly similar to it in many of its aspects, but does that mean we’re heading in the same direction?