To many Ukrainians and Europeans, the European Union’s 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 Hungary with Russian oil.
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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.
Last year, they received 9.25 million tonnes through it, worth more than $4bn. It’s 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.
“In 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’s a deal where we just cannot win,” said Inna Sovsun, a Ukrainian parliament member who sits on the energy committee.
“It’s completely, let’s say, weird, but I think the stronger word would be immoral,” she told Al Jazeera.
‘Backbone of supply for Central Europe’
Apart from Hungary and Slovakia, the EU appears to agree with Sovsun.
It banned Russian seaborne crude and refined petroleum products as of January and March 2023, respectively, carving out an exception for pipeline crude “until the Council [of EU leaders] decides otherwise”.
Other EU members who sit on the Druzhba pipeline – Austria, Czechia, Germany and Poland – 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.
“Druzhba was … the backbone of supply for Central Europe,” John Roberts, a senior partner with Methinks, an energy consultancy, told Al Jazeera. “The loss of Druzhba to most of Western Europe is a big annoyance, but it’s not desperate … That’s not true for Central Europe.”
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.
“It’s 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,” said Costis Stambolis, executive director of the Institute of Energy for Southeast Europe (IENE).
A ‘geopolitical struggle’
When oil flowed into Slovakia again on April 23, Prime Minister Robert Fico said, “The Druzhba pipeline and oil were used as tools in a geopolitical struggle.”
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.
Fico and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban were suspicious about Ukraine’s account of the damage. Orban wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on March 3, urging her to enforce Ukraine’s obligation to allow oil to flow.
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.
By then, Orban had reversed his December approval of the loan, staging a battle of wills with Kyiv.
Ukraine appeared to bide its time until a Hungarian general election unseated Orban on April 12, and then fixed the pipeline.
Asked if the whole standoff was staged to get rid of Orban, Sovsun said, “I don’t think there is [anything] we wouldn’t do to prevent the killings of Ukrainians.”
No love lost
Sovsun believed Budapest tutored Kyiv in blackmail in 2016, when the two started negotiating about Hungarian minority language rights in western Ukraine.
Kyiv conceded bilingual education, but, Sovsun said, “The position of Hungary was that all instruction up to the high school should be done in Hungarian.”
“They were never happy,” she said. “It was obvious they were just coming up with new pretences and new reasons of how to block Ukraine’s 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,” she said.
In June 2025, Hungary formally blocked Ukrainian accession talks. As though to cement his decision, Orban held a referendum on Ukraine’s EU membership, where 95 percent of ballots returned were against it. The opposition said the result was engineered.
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’s curtailment of free information and democratic processes meant Hungary was a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”, and its “respect for democratic norms and standards is absent.”
When Hungary assumed the rotating presidency of the EU in 2024, both the EU and NATO dismissed Orban’s shuttle diplomacy to Moscow and Beijing as a private adventure that didn’t represent them. Many EU members sent non-cabinet-level staff to Hungary’s Council gatherings.
Under Fico, Slovakia played second fiddle in obstructing Ukraine’s relationship with the EU.
When Fico visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused him of striking “shadow agreements with Putin” designed “for personal gain”.
Fico called Zelenskyy “an enemy of Slovakia” the following month for opposing the supply of Russian gas across Ukraine, and the suggestion that Slovakia buy gas from Azerbaijan instead.
In an apparent imitation of Orban, Fico flew to Moscow for Russia’s May 9 Victory Day parade last year, commemorating the end of World War II – the only EU leader to do so.
Russian state media praised him for standing up to “blatant and frenzied pressure” to stay home.
Fico later told his parliament that neutrality from NATO “would benefit Slovakia very much,” and said he was “extremely interested in standardisation of relations” with Moscow.
Fico joined Orban in vetoing Ukraine’s EU talks in June 2025 and blocked an 18th sanctions package against Russia.
Zelenskyy 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.
Fico said he would support Ukraine’s EU accession, without explaining what led to the switch, leaving Hungary as the holdout.
Sabotage inside Russia
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’s loan and EU membership hostage.
Many Europeans agree and do not blame Kyiv for its reluctance to repair the Druzhba pipeline.
“The whole idea of saying to Ukraine, ‘Now fix the hole the Russians have made in order that we can persuade Orban to lift a veto over the 90 billion’, it’s so extraordinary,” said Catherine Fieschi, a scholar on European politics at Carnegie Europe, a think tank. “The Europeans have been so dismal on a number of these issues that Ukraine is right to kick us up the backside,” she told Al Jazeera.
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.
Ukraine’s 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.
On April 21, the SBU attacked the Transneft-Privolga pumping station in Samara, damaging five 20,000-tonne tanks of crude that feed Druzhba.
The strikes on Druzhba’s infrastructure have had an impact beyond exports to Hungary and Slovakia.
Reuters estimated 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 to cut its oil production by half a million barrels a day compared with late 2025.
Peter Magyar, Hungary’s 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.
“The Hungarians were great to hide behind,” said Fieschi.
“Things 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,” she said. “There’s going to be a really uncomfortable clarification moment. And I think we’re about to step into it.”
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