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Comment by mariuolo | Hacker News Reader

> How can Russia pressure and disrupt the process when NATO members are the ones most afraid of Putin?

Hungary is also a NATO member and yet its president (Mr. Orban) has been quite chummy with Putin.

Orban is the prime minister not the president. As for being chummy no Hungarian prime minister or president current or former has ever served as board member for Gazprom, nor served as head of shareholders for Nordstream AG, or director of the board for Rosneft the Russian oil company. All these positions were/are held by a former german chancellor Gerhard Schröder whom had put Germany onto the path of closing perfectly working nuclear plants and thus leading to the current dependence on Russian oil and gas:

https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/germany-nuclear-powe...

Don't forget Merkel. There are still people that say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas but could not do anything about it. For 16 years!

There is more "evidence" that Merkel is a long-term Russian intelligence asset, recruited from her youth in East Germany,[1] than that of Trump being the same. One guess on which claim is incessantly repeated by the bien-pensants of the chattering classes.

Bonus: Trump and Stoltenberg argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?

[1] Something else never talked about is how her parents moved from West to East Germany when she was a baby

You are trying to shift the blame, but Germany was not blocking the airspace for weapons delivery to Ukraine or blocking the sanctions. Ration of dependence of Germany on Russian Gas/Oil is way lower then ratio in Hungary.

I'm putting things into perspective. Hungary has 136 km shared border with Ukraine, it also represents only 0.25% of the global GDP, and it is a small country of less than 10 million inhabitants that took in 700'000 Ukrainian refugees. It is okay to disagree with some of their positions, but to put blame one them for the current mess is ridiculous. As for ratio of dependence I have no idea how you did measure it, but it was certainly not per capita gas consumption.

Fair enough. I must imagine there will be intense pressure from NATO members towards Hungary if they're the only ones protesting. Is there a process for booting a member?

Hungary has already stated they will not oppose Finland/Sweden NATO membership, so it is not really relevant.

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