Six weeks from an election could see them defeated after 16 years of creeping authoritarianism, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party are pulling out all the stops - turning Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky into an outright enemy of Hungary and campaign mobiliser.

For weeks, billboards and digital publications have been flooded with AI-generated pictures of warmongering EU leaders and Péter Magyar, Orbán’s challenger, loading Zelensky with money. Now, Orbán has taken this a step further by blocking the release of €90 billion from the EU to Kyiv after Russian oil supplied via the Druzhba pipeline was suspended due to damage at a western Ukrainian pumping station.

To talk about this dispute and energy nationalism generally, Magyar’s increasing advantage and Fidesz’s growing panic, fears of a false flag operation and an election delay, Orbán’s miscalculations around “Peak Trump”, Ukraine’s European ambitions, and the EU’s wilful policy inertia, Twenty-Four Two’s co-hosts Tim Jones and Pepijn Bergsen are joined for a panel discussion by energy-geopolitics analyst Bill Farren-Price and veteran EU journalist Simon Taylor.

The latest EU-Hungary standoff over aiding Ukraine reveals the “learned helplessness of the leaders of one of the richest continents on earth being held back by the prime minister of a country of 10 million,” says Pepijn. “Guys, just throw together some guarantees, go to the markets, borrow some money, send it to the Ukrainians. It is literally that simple. Just set up a Zoom call without Viktor in it and get this done”.

Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.

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