A strange story about friendship and the fog of war

HUNGARY - In Brief 23 Feb 2026 by Istvan Racz

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For this story, friendship represents the Druzhba oil pipeline, through which Hungary brings in most of its 4.9m metric tons (2025, estimated) of crude oil imports, from Russia of course, but through the territory of Ukraine. Druzhba literally means 'friendship', although no one can be sure exactly who is friendly to whom in this particular case. The 'fog of war', as the Reader will instantly know, is the phenomenon that quite often, finding out what the true war situation is poses extreme difficulty, as the participants of the story are not at all interested to tell the truth on the facts, even if they know them, which is not always the case. Well, in this case, referring to the fog of political animosity could be probably more correct.  So, the story starts with a Russian drone or missile hitting the Druzhba pipeline at Brodi, Western Ukraine on January 27. Or it hit the infrastructure around it, or both. A big fire erupted, that seems to be for sure. And, Hungary has not received any little crude oil through this pipeline since January 27, which is a hard fact, not debated by anyone. Here, the problem is that Druzhba is by far the most important route through which Hungary imports crude oil, and that Hungary insists on importing Russian oil, which is indeed significantly cheaper than other kinds of oil (Brent, e.g.), although it is not publicly known exactly how much cheaper. The next problem is that according to Hungary's government, in this case represented mainly by the minister of foreign affairs, Russia hit a fuel tank next to the pipeline and not the pipeline itself, which remained intact, or it may have suffered some minor damage only, which the Ukrainian ope...