Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Friday questioned who began the Russia-Ukraine war and criticized Western leaders for supporting Kyiv.

Orbán said EU leaders are justifying their support by framing Ukraine as a small country that has been attacked.

“Of course, it’s not that small,” Orbán said, referring to Ukraine. “And it’s not even clear who attacked whom. In any case, it is a country that has been subjected to violence.”

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he said two of Moscow’s key goals were to “liberate Donbas from the Kyiv regime” and to “demilitarize and denazify” the country.

In his annual press conference on Friday, Putin defended what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine. “We don’t consider ourselves responsible for people’s deaths because it wasn’t us who started the war,” Putin said in response to a question, blaming the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a “coup d’etat.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha responded to Orbán’s comments by posting on social media: “Just as ‘not clear’ as it was for Hungaryʼs leadership in 1939.”

Orbán was speaking to reporters after the European Council summit, where EU leaders agreed to jointly borrow €90 billion to send financial aid to Ukraine.

Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia chose not to participate in the program to fund Kyiv, cementing their Ukraine-skeptic alliance and delivering another blow to the EU’s unity after leaders failed to reach an agreement on using more than €200 billion in frozen Russian state assets to help Ukraine.

Orbán also revealed before Thursday’s EU summit that Putin had warned the Hungarian leader that Moscow would take countermeasures if the EU tapped Russian assets to help Ukraine.

According to Orbán, Putin told him there will be “a strong response using all the instruments of international law, and they will take into account the position of each individual member state of the union.”

“So we Hungarians have protected ourselves,” Orbán said.

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I realised today that I cannot actually remember the last time I felt relaxed. I'm so fucking tired.

The Japanese region of Niigata is expected to endorse a decision to restart the world's largest nuclear power plant on Monday, a watershed moment in the country's pivot back to nuclear since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, located about 220 km (136 miles) northwest of Tokyo, was among 54 reactors shut after a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

The three represents are the hardest concept in all of Marxism

Tenures end for mission chiefs in at least 29 countries, including 13 in Africa, as US reshapes its diplomatic posture

The Trump administration is recalling nearly 30 career diplomats from ambassadorial and other senior embassy posts as it moves to reshape the US diplomatic posture abroad with personnel deemed fully supportive of Donald Trump’s “America first” priorities.

Africa is the continent most affected by the removals, with ambassadors from 13 countries being removed: Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Mauritius, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia and Uganda.

Second is the Asia-Pacific region, with ambassadorial changes coming to six countries: Fiji, Laos, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Vietnam affected.

Four countries in Europe (Armenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovakia) are affected; as are two each in the Middle East (Algeria and Egypt); South Asia (Nepal and Sri Lanka); and the western hemisphere (Guatemala and Suriname).

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/55456416

Kimchi from China sells to restaurants for about 1,700 won ($1.15) per kilogram, while Korean-made versions average about 3,600 won ($2.45), more than double the price.

Around three-quarters of South Korea’s kimchi manufacturers are micro-businesses with four or fewer employees. Most rely on labour-intensive methods that struggle to compete with industrial-scale production in China.

He was reading "Atlas Shrugged". He was looking like the most libertarian college student ever. This annoyed me so much I wanted to share it with you guys.

My country is doomed

capitalism's worst enemy has been socialism, most vocally communism.

what was the counteracting -ism to feudalism during the ages? was the counteracting -ism a different one at some point?

all replies welcome, serious textwalls and unserious oneliners alike vice versa

Most of what you eat is sausages. I mean, if we’re going to get literal about it. Sausage derives from the Latin salsicus, which means “seasoned with salt”. You might think of a sausage as a simple thing, but on this reading it is everything and nothing, a Borgesian meta-concept that retreats as you approach it.

From another perspective, a sausage is an offal-filled intestine, or the macerated parts of an electrocuted or asphyxiated pig or other animal – generally parts that you wouldn’t knowingly eat – mixed with other ingredients that, in isolation, you might consider inedible. For some reason, it is seldom marketed as such.

But to the legislators of the EU, a sausage can now have only one meaning: a cylindrical object containing meat. Never mind that cylindrical objects containing no meat have been marketed under names such as “Glamorgan sausage” (selsig Morgannwg) for at least 150 years. Never mind that even Germans once felt the need to call animal sausages mettwurst, to distinguish them from other kinds. Never mind that almost everyone knows what “veggie sausage”, “vegan sausage” or “plant-based sausage” mean. A recent survey of 20,000 Dutch people found that 96% are not confused by such terms, which is probably a higher percentage than those who can readily distinguish left from right. The consumer must at all costs be protected from an imaginary threat.