Orbán rejects EU face-saving offer on Ukraine pipeline, saying ‘no oil, no money’
By Andrew Rettman, The EUobserver, 17 March 2026
BRUSSELS - Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has dragged top EU officials into his April re-election battle, even as the EU itself warned against “adversaries … in the system” on election integrity.
EU institutions unveiled a deal with Ukraine on Tuesday (17 March) to fix a damaged Russian oil pipeline supplying Hungary, which Orbán has put front and centre in his campaign, claiming Kyiv had blocked it to hurt him, leading to him vetoing €90bn of EU aid to Ukraine, and causing a geopolitical melodrama ahead of the Hungarian vote on 12 April.
A European Commission expert was to visit the Druzhba pipe and any repairs would be paid from the EU budget, said commission president Ursula von der Leyen, EU Council president António Costa, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in letters posted online.
Zelensky’s letter said the fastest it could be fixed was in “one and a half months”, putting it past Orbán’s election day.
Neither the EU Commission nor Ukraine’s EU embassy gave further information on who would inspect Druzhba or when.
Tuesday’s deal was designed to give Orbán a face-saving off-ramp on his €90bn-veto ahead of Thursday’s EU summit in Brussels.
It still made von der Leyen, Costa, and Zelensky unwilling actors in Orbán’s pre-election theatre.
It stopped short of handing him a full pre-election ‘win’ in Brussels. The three pushed back against what the commission has said were Orbán’s false claims of a Druzhba-sabotage plot, with Zelensky saying the oil had stopped due to “recent Russian terrorist attacks” and faster repairs were “technically impossible”.
Von der Leyen’s spokeswoman told press in Brussels: “We understand very well the attitude of president Zelensky … because Russia destroys [Druzhba], Ukraine repairs, Russia again destroys a few days later”.
But Orbán insisted on full EU endorsement and appeasement of his line: “No oil deliveries? No money. It’s that simple,” he said on X on Tuesday.
Hungary’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó also opted to amp up the drama instead of cooling the dispute.
“Don’t be fooled. This is a political game. Every step was coordinated between Kyiv and Brussels,” said Szijjártó on X.
Orbán has also disseminated “aggressive anti-Ukrainian narratives” in his campaign, in the words of Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski, speaking in Brussels on Monday.
The Kremlin-friendly Hungarian PM invited three Russian intelligence officers to help him fix the April vote, according to Hungarian media.
The Orbán side had previously been backed by disinformation circulated by Israeli private-intelligence company Black Cube in elections in 2018 and 2022.
And Hungary is just one of several sensitive votes in Europe this year, in which far-right EU populists and Russia are expected to try to skew outcomes using dirty tricks.
Some of the most vulnerable ones left include Slovenian elections (22 March), Bulgaria (19 April), Armenia (7 June), Iceland’s EU membership referendum (29 August), and regional elections in eastern Germany, according to the European Platform for Democratic Elections, a watchdog in Berlin.
“Every national election is now a target of [Russian] interference [and] 2026 could be a perfect storm in Europe,” said EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas at a conference in Brussels also on Tuesday.
The EU has launched sanctions procedures and withheld Hungarian funding over Orbán’s illiberal rule broadly speaking over the past eight years.
EU institutions also have an anti-election meddling task-force they are sending to Armenia, a Russian counter-propaganda cell, and election-observation missions.
But most of its pro-democracy instruments were for non-EU members, posing a challenge on how to handle internal disruptors.
Enemy within?
“We have to also keep in mind one thing, that our adversaries sometimes are also, in some countries, very much in the system,” Kallas said on Tuesday — without naming any individual country.
“Russia and China alone invested up to €11bn” into election-linked disinformation campaigns in 2025, Kallas added, with Moscow spending €300m to €400m on Moldova’s election last year, for instance.
“There is now a marketplace for manipulation. Actors outsource it to intermediaries and contractors including private companies,” she said, recalling Black Cube, which was also active in Slovenia ahead of its election next week, according to an investigation.
“It’s not only the battles that we see on the ground, the rockets firing [in Ukraine] … we also have the cognitive war, the war for the hearts and minds of the people,” Kallas said.
For his part, Orbán has also tried to whip up bad will between the Hungarian minority in Ukraine and other Ukrainians.
And commenting on Russia’s similar modus operandi, Milojko Spajić, the prime minister of Montenegro, said at the Kallas conference on Tuesday: “They love ethnic tensions. They like the constant battle of the ethnic groups against each other”.
Author
Andrew RettmanAndrew Rettman is EUobserver’s foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.
