Digest of news from Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland
August 3 – August 9, 2026
Brussels moves to finally cut Hungary and Slovakia off Russian oil
With Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy grid putting Druzhba pipeline transit at fresh risk, the European Commission says it is accelerating efforts to help Hungary and Slovakia diversify away from Russian crude, the last hold-outs in an EU market it wants entirely free of Russian energy. "Our goal is to ban all Russian energy sources from the European market, and we are on track to successfully deliver that strategy," Commission spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters in Brussels, noting that Russian oil is already under EU sanctions everywhere except in these two countries, and that Brussels is working closely with both to change that.
Druzhba has earned that outsized attention. When a January missile strike knocked the pipeline offline, Hungary and Slovakia responded not by scrambling for alternatives but by suspending their own diesel exports to Ukraine, the first clear sign of how exposed both countries are to a single Soviet-era route. Budapest then went a step further, threatening to block the EU's 20th sanctions package outright unless Ukraine restored Druzhba transit, turning a vulnerability into leverage. Brussels' new push to fund diversification is, in effect, an attempt to defuse that leverage for good.
Slovakia
1. Fire breaks out at Slovakia's only oil refinery in Bratislava
Analysis:
A storage tank ruptured at the Slovnaft refinery in Bratislava on Friday afternoon, igniting the fuel oil inside and sending a column of thick black smoke visible from the city's ring road and surrounding neighborhoods. Company spokesperson Anton Molnár said the plant's own fire brigade brought the blaze under control with no injuries and no immediate danger to nearby residents, though the cause is still under investigation; firefighters said the priority throughout was stopping the burning liquid from spreading beyond the tank itself.
A fire at the country's only refinery is unlikely to move markets on its own, but the timing gives it more weight than it might otherwise carry: Slovakia spent this same week being courted by Brussels to reduce its dependence on a single external pipeline, only for an incident at its own domestic refining capacity to underline how many single points of failure sit inside the country's energy system, not just at its borders.
Czech Republic
1. Prague reviews airport drone defenses after a Leipzig bomb scare
2. A new poll shows Pavel would beat Babiš in a presidential runoff
Analysis:
After a drone carrying an explosive device was found at Leipzig Airport in Germany, Prague Airport said it is working with Czech security forces to review the incident and weigh any recommendations that come out of it, on top of protections it says have long been in place against unauthorized drone activity. Deputy PM and Industry Minister Karel Havlíček said the state would take proportionate security measures without detailing what those would be, while the national police presidium noted Czechia is already operating under an elevated terror threat level and is prepared to respond to drones violating no-fly zones. Analysts framed the Leipzig incident as a warning sign for European airports generally, a hybrid threat many are still not fully equipped to handle.
Separately, a new NMS poll for Novinky found President Petr Pavel would beat Prime Minister Andrej Babiš in a hypothetical runoff, 44% to 37%, with Pavel also leading the broader field of potential candidates on 39% support against Babiš's 15%. Industry Minister Havlíček placed third with 11% despite saying he has no plans to run. The current president has floated seeking a second term in the 2028 election and says he will announce a final decision next year, while Babiš, who lost to Pavel in 2023, still says he has no interest in a rematch.
Between an airport quietly bracing for the kind of drone incident that just hit Germany and a president who keeps polling well ahead of the man who runs his government, Czechia's week captured a country hedging against threats on two very different fronts, one drifting in from outside its borders, the other sitting inside its own governing coalition.
Hungary
1. PM Magyar warns drought damage could exceed Hungary's worst year on record
2. Ex-FM Szijjártó faces up to three years in prison over a bribery probe
Analysis:
Prime Minister Péter Magyar told Bloomberg that Hungary's 2026 weather losses, driven by drought and early frost, could top 500 billion forints ($1.6 billion), more than the country lost in the previous record year of 2022. Compounding the damage, Magyar said restoring the Paks nuclear plant to full output could take at least a month if low Danube water levels persist into autumn, an outcome IESS has already traced back to years of the plant's own profits being drained out under the previous government rather than reinvested in the infrastructure that might have cushioned exactly this kind of shock. A slight rise in river levels and cooler peak temperatures let Budapest pause its calls for voluntary conservation for now, but Magyar was blunt about the longer horizon: "The Hungarian economy cannot function without Paks for months on end. We need to find a solution."
Hungary's Index newspaper reported that a bribery investigation into former Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, a close Orbán ally, has been transferred from prosecutors to Budapest's police headquarters as more squarely within its jurisdiction, after prosecutors said the complaint against him "may indicate the crime of accepting a bribe." Szijjártó no longer holds a parliamentary seat and therefore no immunity, meaning a conviction could carry up to three years in prison.
A government still improvising its way through a drought it inherited the vulnerability to, and a prosecution finally reaching a name from the era that created that vulnerability in the first place, make for a fitting split-screen: Hungary is simultaneously paying down the physical bill for the Orbán years and opening the legal ledger on them.
Poland
1. Tens of thousands march across 22 Polish cities against anti-Ukrainian violence
2. Interior Ministry dismisses PiS's call to deport conscription-age Ukrainian men as "populism"
3. Polling shows PiS collapsing on the right as Confederation surges
Analysis:
Demonstrations took place in 22 Polish cities on August 9 under the banner "Nie bądź obojętny," don't be indifferent, a phrase borrowed from Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski's 2020 speech marking the camp's liberation, in which he urged people never to grow numb to cruelty toward minorities. The protests followed a Friday demonstration in which organizers, under the slogan "My Poland doesn't hit, insult, or incite," delivered a petition signed by more than 11,000 people to the prime minister's office and interior ministry demanding decisive action against attacks on Ukrainians. The nationwide campaign, organized by the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, comes after weeks of rising verbal and physical assaults on people targeted for their origin, language, or accent, including a case in Kraków where a 39-year-old man who had abused two Ukrainians turned himself in to police days earlier.
Against that backdrop, Interior Ministry spokesperson Karolina Gałecka dismissed as "sheer absurdity and populism" a pledge by PiS deputy leader and MEP Tobiasz Bocheński that a future PiS government would move to deport Ukrainian men of conscription age not working legally in Poland. Gałecka countered that 95% of conscription-age Ukrainian men in Poland are legally employed and paying taxes, that Poland already deports those who break the law, and that removals actually rose sharply under the current government, from roughly 3,000 in PiS's last year in power to about 10,000 in 2025 alone. "Poland is a hospitable, open country," she added, pointing out that Ukrainian students who simply shop and study here are contributing to GDP as well.
That fight is playing out against a rapidly shifting map of Polish public opinion: an Opinia24 poll put the ruling Civic Coalition on 30.3%, largely steady, while PiS has collapsed to 17.2%, down 5.6 points, with much of that support migrating to the anti-Ukrainian Confederation, now on 15.3%, and to a second, further-right Confederation of the Polish Crown on 9%. Mateusz Morawiecki's breakaway Rozwój Plus, formed after last month's split in PiS, would clear parliament's threshold on 5.3%. Pollsters at Opinia24 noted the two Confederation parties combined now approach the support PiS itself commanded as recently as June, the clearest sign yet that PiS's implosion is a net gain for the harder-line, more openly anti-Ukrainian end of Polish politics rather than for the center.
Poland's week amounts to a single argument playing out on three stages at once: a street-level campaign insisting the country not look away from violence against Ukrainians, a government defending its own record while an opposition tests how far anti-Ukrainian rhetoric can carry it electorally, and a polling picture suggesting that rhetoric is finding a bigger audience than the mainstream right can currently contain.