An embargo on Russian gas would “ruin the whole European economy,” Viktor Orban says
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has warned of the devastating effects of an EU embargo on gas from Russia, which Brussels hopes to introduce.
Speaking about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in his regular Friday interview slot with Budapest’s Kossuth Radio, Orban said, “the Hungarian government is almost the only one in the whole of Europe that isn’t talking about sanctions and war, but about the need for peace and investing in peace.”
“War isn’t in anyone’s interest,” he insisted, adding that he was surprised to hear so few “voices for peace” within the bloc.
The sweeping EU sanctions imposed on Moscow over the military offensive in Ukraine, including a partial oil embargo, have led to a spike in energy and food prices across Europe.
“If they move to introduce a gas embargo they will ruin the whole European economy,” Orban warned.
Hungary, which arguably has the closest ties with Moscow among EU member states, has taken a more balanced stance on the Russian military operation.
While condemning the use of force and providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Budapest has refused to send weapons and consistently criticized the idea of restrictions on Russian oil, gas, and coal.
A partial embargo on Russian oil was introduced by the EU in late May, but Hungary was among the nations that were given a waiver.
Budapest, which receives most of its oil from Russia through a pipeline, had compared a full ban to having an “an atomic bomb” dropped on its economy.
Last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reiterated that the EU’s goal in the long run is to “get rid of the overall dependency on Russian fossil fuels, all three of them [gas, oil, and coal], and never to go back again.”
The Hungarian PM said he would not rule out the possibility of von der Leyen’s plans eventually coming to fruition, but a lot of it will depend on Europe’s largest economy, Germany.
Berlin initially stated that an oil embargo would be out of the question, but changed its mind just a few weeks later, Orban said, adding that the Germans can reject a ban on Russian gas now, but there’s no way of knowing if they will stick to that position in the future.
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The PGA Tour has suspended 17 players – including six-time major winner Phil Mickelson alo former world #1 Dustin Johnson – after they teed off at a controversial tournament backed by Saudi Arabia.
The US space agency seeks to demystify the unidentified aerial phenomena
The space agency has officially commissioned a new study to analyze all existing evidence and develop proper data-gathering methods and tools to shed light on the nature and origin of unidentified aerial phenomena using science, according to a NASA press release on Thursday.
“We will be identifying what data – from civilians, government, non-profits, companies – exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyze it,” said astrophysicist David Spergel, who will lead a team of experts in a study set to begin later this fall.
The US space agency specifically emphasized that so far there is “no evidence UAPs are extra-terrestrial in origin,” pouring some cold water on the prospect of discovering alien technology. It admitted, however, that the “limited number of observations of UAPs currently makes it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events.”
NASA’s research is being “coordinated widely across the government,” but will be separate from the Pentagon’s more secretive Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), or its predecessor, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF).
In recent years, a new acronym has been created to replace the term ‘UFO’ – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) – in the hope that science, academia, and the media would be more open to investigating the subject. However, such is the manufactured stigma attached to this topic that it is still deemed too ‘taboo’ for many.
“One of the things we tangentially hope to do as part of this study, simply by talking about it in the open, is to help to remove some of the stigma associated with it, and that will yield obviously, increased access to data, more reports, more sightings,” assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Daniel Evans.
The project is expected to take about nine months to complete, and the agency promised to make all of its findings public and open for review. “Consistent with NASA’s principles of openness, transparency, and scientific integrity, this report will be shared publicly,” Evans added.
Public discussion of UFOs and UAPs has increased since 2017, when it was revealed the Pentagon had a project known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) tasked with identifying (or at least trying to identify) such objects. Last year’s report released to Congress, while largely classified, hinted that the US military was involved in analyzing the “advanced technology” seemingly displayed by UFOs, which it has divided into multiple categories, admitting in one partially-redacted section that “UAP Probably Lack a Single Explanation.”
Spurring a renewal of public interest in the phenomena were three videos released shortly after the AATIP report – and officially confirmed by the Pentagon in 2020 – that showed recordings of unidentified objects performing bizarre maneuvers not believed to be possible with known human technology.
Last month, US Congress held the first public hearing into UFOs in over five decades, where top Pentagon officials revealed that reports of mysterious sightings by military personnel had grown to approximately 400 in recent years, many of which remain unexplained. Previous public hearings on UFOs were conducted in late 1960s, when the Air Force finished its Project Blue Book investigation, concluding that no UFO had ever been a threat to national security and that there was no evidence of their extraterrestrial origin.
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