Newsweek - Uncommon Knowledge: Even With Orbán Gone, Hungary Can’t Cut Russian Ties - Published Apr 14, 2026 at 12:00 PM EDT

 Newsweek 

Uncommon Knowledge: Even With Orbán Gone, Hungary Can’t Cut Russian Ties

Published

Apr 14, 2026 at 12:00 PM EDT

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The Hungarian election results were met with cheers in Kyiv and the capitals of European NATO allies, who toasted the downfall of Viktor Orbán, seen as Vladimir Putin’s man in Budapest.

Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar, is on the pro-European Union center-right: opposed to the Kremlin, supportive of Ukraine, and a friend that Brussels can work with instead of the perennial blocker from Budapest.

The implicit syllogism was irresistible: Orbán out, Moscow out. It was an emancipatory moment. 

All that may be true, but only up to a point. Orbán was the face of a deeper structural problem for Hungary, one that pushed him over time into Putin’s warm embrace.

Orbán may be gone, but the problem isn’t. And Magyar will soon have to reconcile himself with it.

Moscow will make sure of that.

Common Knowledge

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The anti-Orbán case, especially on the liberal and pro-European side, is straightforward. Orbán was not merely awkward on Russia; he was Moscow’s most useful in-house nuisance inside the EU. 

Magyar has promised to alter course and pivot Budapest back toward Brussels. And Orbán did indeed make Hungary uniquely troublesome on Ukraine and sanctions politics within the bloc. 

Hungary was sure to oppose the European Commission’s plans to halt Russian gas imports by the end of 2027. Orbán was a major blocker, too, of a €90 billion ($105 billion) assistance package intended for Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction. 

He was also the vanguard of a White House strategy to leverage its political allies in Europe, like Orbán, and foment nationalist movements that fracture the EU and undermine its institutions, elevating the nation-state over multilateralism.  

It was an outcome also favored by the Kremlin, which prefers a weak Europe unable to cohere into a robust counterstrategy against Russian actions on the continent.

The liberal reading of the election, then, is that Hungary has finally chosen Europe over Putinism. Remove the man, remove the problem. 

The nationalist and Orbán-sympathetic right tells a rather different story. Its preferred version is that Hungary’s Russia policy was never really about affection for the Kremlin at all; it was about national survival in a bad neighborhood.

Orbán himself spent months making that case, saying the “EU and not Russia is Hungary’s real threat” and attacking Brussels for policies that would force Hungary into deeper conflict and higher energy costs.

He also warned that dropping Russian energy would put the economy “on its knees,” insisting that continued access was vital for a landlocked country.

Even after Orbán’s loss, Magyar himself sounded much less like a crusading decoupler than many of his admirers abroad might have hoped. At his first postelection press conference, Euronews reported, he said Hungary would continue seeking cheap energy from Russia. "No one can change geography, Russia and Hungary are here to stay," Magyar said.

He also said that if Putin called, “I’ll pick up the phone,” though he would tell him to stop the war in Ukraine. 

So the familiar argument is now split in a convenient but misleading way.

The liberal side tends to think Orbán was the blockage: replace him with a pro-European government and Hungary’s Russia problem can be rapidly unwound. The nationalist side tends to insist the opposite: this was always sober realism, and liberal outrage simply ignored geography.

Both stories flatter their authors. Neither quite reckons with the whole truth. 

Uncommon Knowledge

Everyone vaguely knows Hungary still buys Russian energy, and enthusiastically so under Orbán. 

The killer datapoint is just how concentrated that dependence has become, even after the rest of Europe spent four years trying to diversify over the Ukraine war. 

According to a Center for the Study of Democracy report based on Eurostat data, Russian crude accounted for 92.29 percent of Hungary’s total crude oil imports in 2025, up from 61 percent in 2021. 

In other words: the postinvasion period did not merely leave Hungary somewhat exposed to the Kremlin. It made the country more dependent on Russian oil than before. 

This shift turned a large exposure into an intractable problem. 

If you think Orbán’s departure alone will produce a swift strategic pivot away from Russian gas, 92.29 percent is an awkward figure. In fact, it’s worse than awkward. It’s a sobering reality check.

Hungary’s Russia relationship wasn’t the byproduct of Orbán’s personal affinity for Putin alone. It is the outcome of a whole commercial and logistical system that adapted itself around Russian supply because it was available, legal under exemption, and hard to replace quickly.  

Orbán may have worsened the problem by entrenching himself with Russia, something his supporters skirt over. But he didn’t create it.  

Let’s start with oil. Hungary is landlocked, and the legacy route that matters is the southern branch of the Druzhba pipeline. 

The EU’s embargo on seaborne Russian crude left carve-outs for countries such as Hungary because their systems were built differently and could not be switched overnight without risking supply disruption. Exemptions were supposed to buy time. In Hungary’s case, they also bought habit. 

Gas is no cleaner a story. Hungary signed a 15-year gas supply deal with Gazprom in 2021, routing deliveries via TurkStream and southeastern Europe rather than Ukraine . The contract outlives election cycles, and the route reflects hard, immovable infrastructure rather than any fickle ideological mood.

The European Commission’s country file shows Hungary’s dependency on Russian fossil fuels at 97.6 percent for natural gas in 2022. A 2025 regional report by Gas Infrastructure Europe similarly noted that Hungary produces only about 17.5 percent of its natural-gas needs domestically, with most imports coming from Russia.

Again, there is politics here, of course. But there is also arithmetic. 

Then there is the power system, which gets less attention in the Budapest-versus-Moscow melodrama than oil and gas but may be the most revealing part of the story.

The European Commission country file shows Hungary’s net electricity imports at 12,584 GWh in 2022, equal to 30.4 percent of electricity available for final consumption. The Commission’s 2025 quarterly electricity report ranked Hungary among the EU’s largest net importers in 2024, at about 11 TWh.

And MAVIR data reported by Diplomacy & Trade show that even in 2025, after some improvement in domestic output, imported electricity still accounted for 20.2 percent of Hungary’s gross electricity turnover, with an import-export balance of 8.997 TWh. 

This is the part many ideological arguments glide past. A government can decide to be nicer to Brussels on Monday. It cannot decide by Tuesday to stop being a structurally import-reliant power market. 

Hungary’s generation mix has improved with solar and still leans heavily on nuclear, but it remains exposed to regional flows, peaks in demand, and cross-border balancing needs. A country that still needs imported electricity to keep the system comfortable is not in a position to behave as if geopolitics were merely a matter of moral posture. 

There is a further irony. Hungary’s Russia problem is often narrated as a story of sovereign defiance. 

In practice, it looks rather less sovereign. Eurostat’s newest overview put Hungary among the EU member states with the highest shares of natural gas in energy imports and showed the bloc as a whole still heavily import-dependent, though far less so than before.

The Commission country data list Hungary’s overall energy import dependency at 64.2 percent in 2022 and 62.5 percent in 2023. Dependence on Russian oil and gas sits under a broader reliance on outside energy. Budapest’s room for maneuver is constrained not only by Moscow, but by physics, networks, and a longstanding inability to supply itself.

In Hungary's Walls

None of this means a post-Orbán Hungary cannot change. It plainly can.

Magyar may be less willing to serve as Moscow’s lawyer in Brussels. He may prove more cooperative on EU diplomacy, more Atlanticist in tone, and less interested in grand civilizational flirtations with Putinism. 

Style matters in politics. So does voting behavior in the Council. 

But if the question is whether Orbán’s exit produces a sea change in Hungary’s relationship with Moscow, the answer is more mundane, and therefore more durable.

Hungary’s exposure to Russia was embedded in pipes, contracts, refinery configuration, import balances, and regional power-market realities long before Sunday’s ballots were counted. 

A new government can revise rhetoric quickly. It can revise molecules and megawatts only slowly. That is the unromantic lesson of the week. 

Orbánism may be out. But Russia, in the Hungarian energy system, is still in the walls. 

Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to help produce this story. Learn more about Martyn.

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