Digest of news from Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland
September 7 – September 13, 2026
Slovakia
1. PM Fico says Germany's far-right state election win shouldn't be read as "the end of democracy"
2. Slovakia blocks the EU's sanctions rollover for a second time in two weeks
Analysis:
Prime Minister Robert Fico used social media to defend the AfD's win in the Saxony-Anhalt state election as "a sovereign decision of voters in a sovereign country," arguing that governing parties lose elections precisely when they ignore illegal migration, take belligerent positions, back wars, and refuse to acknowledge the toll EU climate policy takes on competitiveness. His one stated hope was that the result wouldn't be used to justify framing "war with Russia" as a distraction from those governing parties' own failures.
For the second time in under two weeks, EU ambassadors meeting at Coreper failed to agree on rolling over individual sanctions targeting those responsible for undermining Ukraine's territorial integrity, blocked again by Slovakia. Bratislava is pushing for a six-month extension instead of the proposed year, and has not dropped a separate demand to remove several unnamed individuals from the existing sanctions list. Diplomats say talks will continue ahead of a September 15 deadline, and Slovak officials insist an extension will still happen in time, while declining to discuss their negotiating position in any detail.
The PM publicly rooting for European voters who reward parties like the AfD and a government slow-walking sanctions tied directly to Ukraine's sovereignty are, at this point, simply two expressions of the same governing instinct in Bratislava: treat pressure from Brussels and Kyiv alike as something to be managed and minimized rather than met head-on.
Czech Republic
1. Defense Minister Zůna quietly blocks the army chief's trip to Kyiv's security summit
2. Former FM Lipavský warns Europe against seeking peace through deals with Putin
Analysis:
Czech Armed Forces Chief of General Staff Miroslav Hlaváč did not attend the Yalta European Strategy security conference in Kyiv this month after Defense Minister Jaromír Zůna's ministry simply never acted on his request for permission to travel, according to Respekt. Zůna never said no outright; he said nothing, which under Czech procedure was enough to keep the general home. Ukrainian officials reportedly told the magazine they understood the decision wasn't Hlaváč's own, but read it as one more sign of the Babiš government drifting away from Ukraine, and noted that the general was likely to miss out on drone-warfare lessons and contacts that could have had a direct bearing on the safety of Czech soldiers.
Jan Lipavský, the former foreign minister who did make the trip to Kyiv's YES conference, used the return flight home to warn European politicians against pursuing peace through negotiations with Vladimir Putin, arguing Russia is preparing for a long war and would likely turn its military machine on other European states if it succeeds in Ukraine. He called for Europe to urgently build up air, missile, and anti-drone defenses, deepen joint production and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, and resume large-scale weapons deliveries, framing support for Ukraine's military as a direct investment in European security: every drone or tank destroyed over Ukrainian skies, he noted, is one that never reaches a European border. Only the conviction that victory is unattainable, he argued, will stop Russia, not Europe's desire for peace.
Basically, there is no paradox that the man who actually went to Kyiv came home more alarmed about Russia's intentions than when he left, while the man the government kept from going will never get the chance to be.
Hungary
1. EU's top court rejects Hungary's challenge to using frozen Russian assets for Ukraine
2. Budapest expels ten Russian diplomats, and Moscow promises a "tough and painful" response
Analysis:
The EU General Court dismissed Hungary's lawsuit against the Council's 2024 decision enabling profits from frozen Russian assets to fund military aid to Ukraine through the European Peace Facility, ruling that it has no jurisdiction over a decision so directly tied to the EU's common foreign and security policy. The court also pointed out that Hungary had abstained rather than voted against the original decision, which the Peace Facility's own committee had already taken as grounds to exclude Budapest from deciding how that money gets used, a procedural workaround the lawsuit had specifically tried to unwind.
Days later, Hungary's foreign ministry announced it was expelling ten staff members of Russia's embassy in Budapest for conduct it called incompatible with diplomatic status under the Vienna Convention, without severing diplomatic relations outright. Prime Minister Péter Magyar called it a defense of Hungarian sovereignty. It is by far the largest such expulsion under any Hungarian government in recent memory; the last comparable move came in 2018, when Viktor Orbán's government sent home a single Russian diplomat in solidarity with Britain after the Skripal poisoning. Russia's foreign ministry told TASS it would respond, with spokeswoman Maria Zakharova promising the answer to what she called Budapest's "Russophobic lobby" would be "tough and painful."
The mass expulsion of diplomats indicates that Budapest is effectively moving away from the image of the Kremlin's “ally” in the EU and trying to take pro-Western steps. At the same time, Hungary's attempts to sue over the use of frozen Russian assets to aid Ukraine appear contradictory and raise many questions about real understanding of Budapest in terms of neighbours' needs during the battle for freedom of all East and Central Europe region.
Romania
1. Călin Georgescu accuses President Dan of trying to drag Romania into the war
2. Drone wreckage, some of it still armed, turns up across Romanian territory
Analysis:
Former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu accused President Nicușor Dan of pursuing what he called a "suicidal" policy by asking parliament to approve sending up to 20 Romanian troops to join the Multinational Force Ukraine's operational headquarters, based jointly in France and Britain. Georgescu argued Romania's real strategic value lies in staying neutral, and urged lawmakers to reject the proposal, framing it as an insufficiently explained step toward war; his intervention followed a statement from the presidential administration warning that false claims about Romania preparing to send troops directly into Ukraine were already circulating online.
That argument ran headlong into the week's other Romanian story. On September 11, authorities recovered drone wreckage at multiple sites, near Constanța, in border county Tulcea, and in the Black Sea itself, with one fragment still carrying a live warhead that specialists safely neutralized; a suspected fragment reported by a commercial vessel turned out to carry no explosives. The following day, a drone that had crossed Ukrainian and Moldovan airspace before heading into northeastern Romania prompted Romanian F-16s to scramble and an RO-Alert warning for Botoșani county, before the wreckage was ultimately found in a cornfield in Suceava county, having left a small crater and a brief fire but no casualties.
Right now, Romania is a literal proof of the Russia`s aggression reaching onto Europe soil while one of its most prominent political voices argued that the country's safest position is to look the other way.
Poland
1. Nearly 80% of Poles say Poland should help the Baltic states if Russia attacks them
2. FM Sikorski says Poland won't block Ukraine's EU accession clusters
3. A Russian drone and missile barrage hits meters from the Polish border, and a train
Analysis:
An IBRIS poll found 77.8% of Poles believe their country should come to the aid of Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia if Russia attacked any of them, against 16.1% opposed and 6.1% undecided, based on a survey of 1,068 respondents conducted September 4-5.
Speaking alongside Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha in Kyiv, Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said Poland would not stand in the way of opening negotiating clusters in Ukraine's EU accession process, acknowledging the talks won't be easy, just as they weren't for Poland, but noting the European Commission already considers Ukraine ready to begin them; he added that Poland hopes Ukraine will finish implementing its Association Agreement, including the deep free trade area, which could let it join the single market even before full EU membership.
At the same press conference, Sikorski said Russian terrorism "has already entered" Europe, describing the conflict as an ideological war over restoring Russia's claimed right to dominate its neighbors as much as a physical one, and pointed to strikes landing "literally a few hundred meters from the Polish border" as proof that Polish and Ukrainian security are now inseparable. His comments came hours after Polish systems detected an overnight barrage of Russian "Geran-5" jet drones targeting western Ukraine, with one striking a Kyiv-Warsaw train route and another landing near the Dorohusk-Yahodyn border crossing; two drones came down within one and five kilometers of the Polish border itself, prompting Polish fighter jets to scramble, though Poland's Operational Command said by mid-morning that no violation of Polish airspace had occurred.
The Polish government's own response to the train strike was less coordinated than its rhetoric: Poland's defense ministry initially directed reporters to the foreign ministry for details, the foreign ministry said it had no information at all before it stopped answering calls, and it fell to Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński to publicly confirm the attack on social media, calling it a Russian terrorist strike and declaring Russia "an enemy of the free world," while Sikorski, still in Kyiv, posted only that "Putin is escalating the situation." A day later, Polish border guards confirmed a drone had struck a truck near the same crossing, even as Ukrainian border officials said the Yahodyn checkpoint itself had not been directly hit.
Poles are more willing than ever to back their Baltic neighbors and Sikorski is “happy” to say Russian terrorism has arrived at Poland's doorstep, but when an actual strike landed near that doorstep, the government's own ministries needed several hours and a fair amount of public confusion to agree on what had just happened.