Free Republic

Hungary will deploy soldiers and equipment to protect key energy infrastructure amid what Prime Minister Viktor Orban described as a potential Ukrainian threat, he said on Feb. 25, escalating tensions tied to disrupted Russian oil transit....

KYIV, Ukraine, and MOSCOW — When the Kremlin launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the assumption in Moscow, and much of the West, was that Russian forces would take the country in a matter of days. Instead, what the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" has become the biggest land war in Europe since World War II and has lasted longer than the Soviet army's fight against Nazi Germany. Russia's war on Ukraine is a grinding war of attrition. Ukraine has managed to hold a much larger army to minimal gains while adjusting to a life under constant...

Ukraine is outmatched by Russian forces and requires significantly more infantry and weapons if it hopes to win the war, according to military intelligence and independent battlefield monitors. Although Moscow is paying an extraordinary price for comparatively minimal gains, western officials believe the country can sustain at least another year of war at the current rate of attrition. On Tuesday it will be four years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After months of incremental advances, it appears to be on the verge of capturing a series of strategic locations in Ukraine’s so-called “fortress belt” and is expanding...

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine surpassed 1,418 days last month, it officially exceeded a historic milestone — the same span of time it took Moscow to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. And unlike the Red Army that pushed all the way to Berlin eight decades ago in what it called the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s 4-year-old, all-out invasion of its neighbor is still struggling to fully capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland. After Moscow failed to seize the capital of Kyiv and install a puppet government in February 2022, the conflict turned into trench warfare with tremendous cost....

Hungary will block a 90-billion-euro ($106 billion) EU loan for Ukraine until it resumes oil shipments to the country via the Druzhba pipeline, its foreign minister said on Friday after Budapest said it would tap strategic reserves to tackle a shortage. Hungary and Slovakia, which have the only remaining refineries in the European Union using Russian oil through Druzhba, have been trying to secure supply since flows were halted on January 27 following what Ukraine said was a Russian drone attack that damaged pipeline infrastructure. Both countries have blamed Ukraine for the delay in restarting the flows for political reasons.

Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar launched his party’s election campaign in Budapest on Sunday, vowing to restore Hungary’s Western orientation just eight weeks before he faces Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in a pivotal vote. Magyar, a former insider in Orbán’s nationalist Fidesz party, burst onto Hungary’s political scene in 2024 after breaking with his political community and quickly forming the center-right Tisza party. After taking around 30% of the vote in European Parliament elections in June 2024, he has grown Tisza into the most formidable political force Orbán has faced during his 16 years at Hungary’s helm. Most independent polls...