\n<\/p>\n
To many Ukrainians and Europeans, the European Union\u2019s unlocking of a 90bn-euro ($105bn) loan to Ukraine on April 23 was a bittersweet victory because it came with a multibillion-dollar gift to Russia.<\/p>\n
EU member Hungary agreed to lift a veto on the loan after Ukraine mended the Druzhba pipeline, which traverses its territory and supplies Hungary with Russian oil.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Ukraine needs the money to fight for another two years, but landlocked Hungary and Slovakia say they both depend on the Druzhba pipeline as their only source of crude.<\/p>\n Last year, they received 9.25 million tonnes through it, worth more than $4bn. It\u2019s a far cry from the roughly $50bn the EU paid Russia for crude in 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine says even this money translates directly into bombs, bullets and Ukrainian lives.<\/p>\n \u201cIn order for us to get some money to survive, the aggressor who is killing us needs to get some money, as well. It seems like it\u2019s a deal where we just cannot win,\u201d said Inna Sovsun, a Ukrainian parliament member who sits on the energy committee.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s completely, let\u2019s say, weird, but I think the stronger word would be immoral,\u201d she told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Apart from Hungary and Slovakia, the EU appears to agree with Sovsun.<\/p>\n It banned Russian seaborne crude and refined petroleum products as of January and March 2023, respectively, carving out an exception for pipeline crude \u201cuntil the Council [of EU leaders] decides otherwise\u201d.<\/p>\n Other EU members who sit on the Druzhba pipeline \u2013 Austria, Czechia, Germany and Poland \u2013 all weaned themselves off its oil, even though they, too, could have taken advantage of the exemption. But three of them are littoral states with oil terminals, and Austria has been fed through the Transalpine pipeline from Italy and other pipelines built to supply Western Europe during the Cold War.<\/p>\n \u201cDruzhba was \u2026 the backbone of supply for Central Europe,\u201d John Roberts, a senior partner with Methinks, an energy consultancy, told Al Jazeera. \u201cThe loss of Druzhba to most of Western Europe is a big annoyance, but it\u2019s not desperate \u2026 That\u2019s not true for Central Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n Hungary might have been supplied via the Adria pipeline that starts in Croatia, but the two countries are locked in a legal battle for its control. Nor was it practical for Hungary and Slovakia to shut down their refineries and import products from neighbours, say energy experts.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very expensive to import refined products on a permanent basis, and shutting down their refineries in Hungary and Slovakia means they lose an entire economy and a whole range of petroleum products like naphtha for fertiliser, asphalt, plastics and so on,\u201d said Costis Stambolis, executive director of the Institute of Energy for Southeast Europe (IENE).<\/p>\n When oil flowed into Slovakia again on April 23, Prime Minister Robert Fico said, \u201cThe Druzhba pipeline and oil were used as tools in a geopolitical struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n Oil had stopped flowing after January 27, when Ukraine said a pumping station on the Druzhba pipeline had been hit in a Russian air raid. The location was too dangerous for work crews to risk their lives mending the damage, Kyiv said.<\/p>\n Fico and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban were suspicious about Ukraine\u2019s account of the damage. Orban wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on March 3, urging her to enforce Ukraine\u2019s obligation to allow oil to flow.<\/p>\n The commission immediately stepped up pressure on Kyiv to allow inspectors to see the extent of the damage. A Hungarian team arrived in Kyiv on March 14, but was not allowed to visit the site. A European team arrived three days later. It, too, was kept away.<\/p>\n By then, Orban had reversed his December approval of the loan, staging a battle of wills with Kyiv.<\/p>\n Ukraine appeared to bide its time until a Hungarian general election unseated Orban on April 12, and then fixed the pipeline.<\/p>\n Asked if the whole standoff was staged to get rid of Orban, Sovsun said, \u201cI don\u2019t think there is [anything] we wouldn\u2019t do to prevent the killings of Ukrainians.\u201d<\/p>\n Sovsun believed Budapest tutored Kyiv in blackmail in 2016, when the two started negotiating about Hungarian minority language rights in western Ukraine.<\/p>\n Kyiv conceded bilingual education, but, Sovsun said, \u201cThe position of Hungary was that all instruction up to the high school should be done in Hungarian.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey were never happy,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was obvious they were just coming up with new pretences and new reasons of how to block Ukraine\u2019s EU integration. They have no moral rights to claim that someone else is blackmailing them after they have been blackmailing Ukraine for over 10 years,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In June 2025, Hungary formally blocked Ukrainian accession talks. As though to cement his decision, Orban held a referendum on Ukraine\u2019s EU membership, where 95 percent of ballots returned were against it. The opposition said the result was engineered.<\/p>\n Hungary has been considered a black sheep in the EU at least since 2018, when the European Parliament moved to deprive it of its voting rights in the Council of EU leaders. By an overwhelming majority, the European Parliament found in 2022 that Orban\u2019s curtailment of free information and democratic processes meant Hungary was a \u201chybrid regime of electoral autocracy\u201d, and its \u201crespect for democratic norms and standards is absent.\u201d<\/p>\n When Hungary assumed the rotating presidency of the EU in 2024, both the EU and NATO dismissed Orban\u2019s shuttle diplomacy to Moscow and Beijing as a private adventure that didn\u2019t represent them. Many EU members sent non-cabinet-level staff to Hungary\u2019s Council gatherings.<\/p>\n Under Fico, Slovakia played second fiddle in obstructing Ukraine\u2019s relationship with the EU.<\/p>\n When Fico visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused him of striking \u201cshadow agreements with Putin\u201d designed \u201cfor personal gain\u201d.<\/p>\n Fico called Zelenskyy \u201can enemy of Slovakia\u201d the following month for opposing the supply of Russian gas across Ukraine, and the suggestion that Slovakia buy gas from Azerbaijan instead.<\/p>\n In an apparent imitation of Orban, Fico flew to Moscow for Russia\u2019s May 9 Victory Day parade last year, commemorating the end of World War II \u2013 the only EU leader to do so.<\/p>\n Russian state media praised him for standing up to \u201cblatant and frenzied pressure\u201d to stay home.<\/p>\n Fico later told his parliament that neutrality from NATO \u201cwould benefit Slovakia very much,\u201d and said he was \u201cextremely interested in standardisation of relations\u201d with Moscow.<\/p>\n Fico joined Orban in vetoing Ukraine\u2019s EU talks in June 2025 and blocked an 18th sanctions package<\/a> against Russia.<\/p>\n Zelenskyy<\/a> and Fico then, inscrutably, patched up their relationship at the Ukrainian town of Uzhgorod last September, while inaugurating a section of newly built European-gauge railway track across their border.<\/p>\n Fico said he would support Ukraine\u2019s EU accession, without explaining what led to the switch, leaving Hungary as the holdout.<\/p>\n All this behaviour from Hungary and Slovakia has convinced Ukraine that the two EU members have been acting in collusion with Moscow, and that energy was merely their latest excuse for holding Ukraine\u2019s loan and EU membership hostage.<\/p>\n Many Europeans agree and do not blame Kyiv for its reluctance to repair the Druzhba pipeline.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole idea of saying to Ukraine, \u2018Now fix the hole the Russians have made in order that we can persuade Orban to lift a veto over the 90 billion\u2019, it\u2019s so extraordinary,\u201d said Catherine Fieschi, a scholar on European politics at Carnegie Europe, a think tank. \u201cThe Europeans have been so dismal on a number of these issues that Ukraine is right to kick us up the backside,\u201d she told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Ukraine now appears to be doing just that: shutting down Druzhba for good by attacking its pumping stations deep inside Russia, and presenting Europe and Russia with force majeure.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s Security Service (SBU) set fire to the Kaleykino oil pumping station in the Republic of Tatarstan, a thousand kilometres (621 miles) from Ukraine, on February 23. The station feeds Western Siberian oil into the Druzhba pipeline.<\/p>\n On April 21, the SBU attacked the Transneft-Privolga pumping station in Samara, damaging five 20,000-tonne tanks of crude that feed Druzhba.<\/p>\n The strikes on Druzhba\u2019s infrastructure have had an impact beyond exports to Hungary and Slovakia.<\/p>\n Reuters estimated<\/a> last month that they had played a role in depriving Russia of 40 percent of its total export capacity, and that the disruption of flows through the Druzhba pipeline had forced Russia<\/a> to cut its oil production by half a million barrels a day compared with late 2025.<\/p>\n Peter Magyar, Hungary\u2019s incoming prime minister, has said he will hold another referendum on Ukrainian accession. Not everyone is sure that it will result in a yes vote, or that other EU members will vote yes.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Hungarians were great to hide behind,\u201d said Fieschi.<\/p>\n \u201cThings are going to get so much tougher on the accession front. And this time, France will have to say what it really means, as will Germany, as will the Netherlands,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a really uncomfortable clarification moment. And I think \u00a0we\u2019re about to step into it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To many Ukrainians and Europeans, the European Union\u2019s unlocking of a 90bn-euro ($105bn) loan to Ukraine on April 23 was a bittersweet victory because it came with a multibillion-dollar gift to Russia. EU member Hungary agreed to lift a veto on the loan after Ukraine mended the Druzhba pipeline, which traverses its territory and supplies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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