Foreign Policy > Hungary

The European Union Hates Hungary, Loves Ukraine

The EU discards members, protects non-members.

J.B. Shurk | March 25, 2026

What’s in a name?  These days...not much.

The European Union does not include Ukraine; nevertheless and notwithstanding the objections of E.U. members Hungary and Slovakia, the European supra-state insists on paying the salaries of Ukraine’s government bureaucracy while that nation’s martial-law-holdover-president, Volodymyr Zelensky, fights to maintain control over a breakaway region that has rejected Ukrainian rule since the 2014 coup d'état of Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych.  

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization does not include Ukraine; nevertheless and notwithstanding the objections of NATO members Hungary and Slovakia, the American-led military alliance insists on sending money and weapons to the Kyiv regime warring with the Russian Federation over territories whose people overwhelmingly identify as Russian.  Former Dutch prime minister and current secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, has stated on multiple occasions that the military alliance would continue to help defend non-NATO-member Ukraine.  According to Ukraine’s newly appointed, thirty-something-year-old defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine has over two million draft dodgers and a quarter of a million active-duty troops who have gone AWOL.  So NATO is protecting a non-NATO country whose men refuse to fight.  NATO is assisting a Kyiv dictatorship that depends almost entirely upon conscription (including the violent “busification” of “recruits” after draft officers break into vehicles and homes with drawn weapons).

While the E.U. and NATO fight Russian authoritarianism by protecting Ukrainian authoritarianism, both institutions have remained relatively quiet as member states sustain actual attacks.  Seven months after Russia moved to annex the Russophone regions of Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipelines transporting natural gas from Russia to Germany were sabotaged and made inoperable.  German, Dutch, and French energy companies own interests in the pipelines.  Subsequent German investigations have identified a dozen Ukrainian suspects, including members of a Kyiv diving school where military personnel train.  Several........

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