Digest of news from Slovakia, Czechia, Poland and Hungary
July 27 – August 2, 2026
Slovakia
1. PM Fico offers to help Hungary through its nuclear-driven energy crisis
Analysis:
Prime Minister Robert Fico said he is watching Hungary's energy situation "very closely" and is ready to help, after Hungarian PM Péter Magyar warned that falling Danube water levels could force a complete shutdown of the Paks nuclear plant, Hungary's only one. Fico said he had already spoken with Deputy PM and Economy Minister Denisa Saková and with the head of Slovak Electric, and stressed that Slovakia's own reactors at Mochovce and Jaslovské Bohunice use a different cooling setup and face no comparable risk, so Bratislava's own supply remains stable even as it offers support to its neighbor.
The offer is a small but notable gesture of regional solidarity at a moment when Slovakia and Hungary have more often been grouped together for their shared reluctance to back EU positions on Ukraine; here, the two governments' cooperative instincts are on display over a domestic energy emergency instead, a reminder that Bratislava-Budapest alignment runs on more than one track.
Czech Republic
1. Czech General Staff seeks to import Ukrainian battlefield experience on drones and air defense
2. FM Macinka hopes President Pavel skips the next NATO summit
Analysis:
Czech Armed Forces Chief of General Staff Miroslav Hlaváč said Czechia wants to draw directly on Ukraine's experience in air and anti-drone defense, announcing a video call this week with Ukraine's newly appointed Chief of the General Staff, Ihor Skybiuk, to set the parameters for that exchange. Hlaváč said working-level experts and lower-level commanders are already swapping lessons from the war, and that warfare is evolving too fast for Czechia to stay, in his words, mute, deaf, and blind to it; he added that Ukraine's ambassador and military attaché had already passed along requests for further support, including air defense and daily field supplies, though any final decision on aid rests with the Czech government rather than the general staff itself.
Foreign Minister Petr Macinka, meanwhile, said he hopes President Petr Pavel will not attend the next NATO summit, whenever and wherever it is held, arguing that if it takes place next year in Tirana it would fall in the middle of Pavel's re-election campaign and give him another platform to use the way Macinka believes he used this year's summit in Ankara. This year's Ankara trip was already contentious: the government tried to exclude Pavel from the Czech delegation, and the president had to secure his place through the Constitutional Court.
Between the general staff's outreach to Kyiv and the foreign minister's open hope that his own head of state sits out the next NATO summit, Czechia's week captured two very different registers of the same governing coalition: pragmatic and forward-looking on the battlefield relationship with Ukraine, and still openly combative over the domestic balance of power between Andrej Babiš's government and President Pavel.
Hungary
1. Hungary launches a new agency to claw back Orbán-era corruption assets
2. PM Magyar warns of the "five most critical days" for Hungary's energy grid
Analysis:
Hungarian lawmakers approved a new National Asset Recovery Agency on July 28, delivering on one of Prime Minister Péter Magyar's core anti-corruption pledges and giving the government a tool aimed squarely at recovering state funds allegedly misappropriated over Viktor Orbán's sixteen years in power. Unlike most anti-corruption bodies elsewhere in Europe, the new agency concentrates powers usually split between prosecutors, police, financial investigators, and civil litigators in one place: it can take over other agencies' corruption investigations, access confidential financial data, fine companies up to 5 billion forints (about $16 million) for obstruction, pursue criminal cases and civil asset-recovery suits, and even temporarily take control of companies suspected of holding illegally obtained state assets.
Days later, Magyar warned the country faces its "five most critical days" yet on energy, as the water level near the Paks nuclear plant approached the minus-134-centimeter threshold at which its last operating reactor would have to shut down, an outcome he said was likely by Sunday. Magyar insisted the plant's safety is not in question, said 50 water-supply specialists are working to secure the cooling water the reactor needs, and asked residents to watch their electricity use during peak evening hours; Hungary has also restarted the Dunamenti thermal plant to help cover the shortfall, and Budapest's metro and tram schedules are being adjusted to save power. Magyar is due to brief acting President Ágnes Forsthoffer and parliamentary faction leaders on the situation on August 3, with a defense working group meeting Sunday to decide whether mandatory consumption limits for large companies are needed.
Taken together, Hungary's week shows a government trying to bank a domestic political win against its predecessor's legacy at the exact moment it is consumed by a genuine operational emergency largely outside its control, a combination that will test whether Magyar's administration can manage a real crisis as capably as it has managed the politics of blaming the last one.
Poland
1. A historic split fractures Poland's largest opposition party, with implications for Ukraine
2. Poland condemns Russia's strike on Kyiv after it damaged Lithuania's embassy
3. Polish commentary calls on Brussels to respond to rising anti-Ukrainian violence
Analysis:
Around 30 members of Poland's Law and Justice party (PiS), including close to a quarter of its parliamentary caucus, formally resigned after party leader Jarosław Kaczyński confirmed the split on July 24, ending nearly two decades of unity under the Kaczyński brothers. The break followed the party leadership's choice of Przemysław Czarnek over former PM Mateusz Morawiecki as its candidate for prime minister, then an ultimatum banning members from parallel political associations that Morawiecki's camp refused to accept. The breakaway group, built around Morawiecki, includes many of PiS's more pro-Ukrainian voices, and independent polling suggests it could clear the 5% threshold to enter parliament on its own; for Ukraine, the practical effect may be a new right-of-center party less inclined to compete with Konfederacja and Grzegorz Braun over anti-Ukrainian rhetoric, even as President Karol Nawrocki, a proponent of a harder line toward Kyiv, becomes the unrivaled dominant figure on a now more fragmented Polish right.
Poland's foreign ministry condemned Russia's latest strike on Kyiv, which damaged Lithuania's embassy in the city, calling it deliberate terror against innocent people that can never be justified and expressing solidarity with both Ukraine and Lithuania. The statement came the same night President Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed that a shortage of Patriot interceptor missiles had left Ukraine able to shoot down just one of 27 Russian ballistic missiles fired at the country, while Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Russia had unleashed real hell on Kyiv and called for urgent reinforcement of Ukraine's air defenses.
A Polish commentary published this week argued Brussels can no longer stay silent on a different front: a sharp rise in anti-Ukrainian violence inside Poland itself, including a recent attack in Wrocław on a young couple targeted for their Ukrainian accents. Polish police logged 180 reports of such attacks in just the first half of 2026, up 30% year-on-year, and the piece placed real responsibility on the Polish state, citing President Nawrocki's exploitation of the controversy over Volodymyr Zelenskyy naming a military unit after UPA figures and the Tusk government's weak response to the 2023 border blockade as accelerants, and calling on the European Commission and Parliament to state plainly that the violence is incompatible with the EU's founding values.
Poland's week captures three layers of the same relationship pulling in different directions at once: firm diplomatic solidarity with Kyiv at the ministerial level, a political realignment on the right whose net effect on Ukraine policy is genuinely uncertain, and a domestic reality on the street that a growing number of Polish commentators say the Polish state itself has allowed to fester.