To many Ukrainians and Europeans, the European Union’s unlocking of a 90bn-euro ($105bn) loan to Ukraine on April 23 was a bittersweet victory because it came with a multibillion-dollar gift to Russia.

EU member Hungary agreed to lift a veto on the loan after Ukraine mended the Druzhba pipeline, which traverses its territory and supplies Hungary with Russian oil.

Ukraine needs the money to fight for another two years, but landlocked Hungary and Slovakia say they both depend on the Druzhba pipeline as their only source of crude.

Last year, they received 9.25 million tonnes through it, worth more than $4bn. It’s a far cry from the roughly $50bn the EU paid Russia for crude in 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine says even this money translates directly into bombs, bullets and Ukrainian lives.

“In order for us to get some money to survive, the aggressor who is killing us needs to get some money, as well. It seems like it’s a deal where we just cannot win,” said Inna Sovsun, a Ukrainian parliament member who sits on the energy committee.

“It’s completely, let’s say, weird, but I think the stronger word would be immoral,” she told Al Jazeera.

‘Backbone of supply for Central Europe’

Apart from Hungary and Slovakia, the EU appears to agree with Sovsun.

It banned Russian seaborne crude and refined petroleum products as of January and March 2023, respectively, carving out an exception for pipeline crude “until the Council [of EU leaders] decides otherwise”.

Other EU members who sit on the Druzhba pipeline – Austria, Czechia, Germany and Poland – all weaned themselves off its oil, even though they, too, could have taken advantage of the exemption. But three of them are littoral states with oil terminals, and Austria has been fed through the Transalpine pipeline from Italy and other pipelines built to supply Western Europe during the Cold War.

“Druzhba was … the backbone of supply for Central Europe,” John Roberts, a senior partner with Methinks, an energy consultancy, told Al Jazeera. “The loss of Druzhba to most of Western Europe is a big annoyance, but it’s not desperate … That’s not true for Central Europe.”

Hungary might have been supplied via the Adria pipeline that starts in Croatia, but the two countries are locked in a legal battle for its control. Nor was it practical for Hungary and Slovakia to shut down their refineries and import products from neighbours, say energy experts.

“It’s very expensive to import refined products on a permanent basis, and shutting down their refineries in Hungary and Slovakia means they lose an entire economy and a whole range of petroleum products like naphtha for fertiliser, asphalt, plastics and so on,” said Costis Stambolis, executive director of the Institute of Energy for Southeast Europe (IENE).

A ‘geopolitical struggle’

When oil flowed into Slovakia again on April 23, Prime Minister Robert Fico said, “The Druzhba pipeline and oil were used as tools in a geopolitical struggle.”

Oil had stopped flowing after January 27, when Ukraine said a pumping station on the Druzhba pipeline had been hit in a Russian air raid. The location was too dangerous for work crews to risk their lives mending the damage, Kyiv said.

Fico and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban were suspicious about Ukraine’s account of the damage. Orban wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on March 3, urging her to enforce Ukraine’s obligation to allow oil to flow.

The commission immediately stepped up pressure on Kyiv to allow inspectors to see the extent of the damage. A Hungarian team arrived in Kyiv on March 14, but was not allowed to visit the site. A European team arrived three days later. It, too, was kept away.

By then, Orban had reversed his December approval of the loan, staging a battle of wills with Kyiv.

Ukraine appeared to bide its time until a Hungarian general election unseated Orban on April 12, and then fixed the pipeline.

Asked if the whole standoff was staged to get rid of Orban, Sovsun said, “I don’t think there is [anything] we wouldn’t do to prevent the killings of Ukrainians.”

No love lost

Sovsun believed Budapest tutored Kyiv in blackmail in 2016, when the two started negotiating about Hungarian minority language rights in western Ukraine.

Kyiv conceded bilingual education, but, Sovsun said, “The position of Hungary was that all instruction up to the high school should be done in Hungarian.”

“They were never happy,” she said. “It was obvious they were just coming up with new pretences and new reasons of how to block Ukraine’s EU integration. They have no moral rights to claim that someone else is blackmailing them after they have been blackmailing Ukraine for over 10 years,” she said.

In June 2025, Hungary formally blocked Ukrainian accession talks. As though to cement his decision, Orban held a referendum on Ukraine’s EU membership, where 95 percent of ballots returned were against it. The opposition said the result was engineered.

Hungary has been considered a black sheep in the EU at least since 2018, when the European Parliament moved to deprive it of its voting rights in the Council of EU leaders. By an overwhelming majority, the European Parliament found in 2022 that Orban’s curtailment of free information and democratic processes meant Hungary was a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”, and its “respect for democratic norms and standards is absent.”

When Hungary assumed the rotating presidency of the EU in 2024, both the EU and NATO dismissed Orban’s shuttle diplomacy to Moscow and Beijing as a private adventure that didn’t represent them. Many EU members sent non-cabinet-level staff to Hungary’s Council gatherings.

Under Fico, Slovakia played second fiddle in obstructing Ukraine’s relationship with the EU.

When Fico visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused him of striking “shadow agreements with Putin” designed “for personal gain”.

Fico called Zelenskyy “an enemy of Slovakia” the following month for opposing the supply of Russian gas across Ukraine, and the suggestion that Slovakia buy gas from Azerbaijan instead.

In an apparent imitation of Orban, Fico flew to Moscow for Russia’s May 9 Victory Day parade last year, commemorating the end of World War II – the only EU leader to do so.

Russian state media praised him for standing up to “blatant and frenzied pressure” to stay home.

Fico later told his parliament that neutrality from NATO “would benefit Slovakia very much,” and said he was “extremely interested in standardisation of relations” with Moscow.

Fico joined Orban in vetoing Ukraine’s EU talks in June 2025 and blocked an 18th sanctions package against Russia.

Zelenskyy and Fico then, inscrutably, patched up their relationship at the Ukrainian town of Uzhgorod last September, while inaugurating a section of newly built European-gauge railway track across their border.

Fico said he would support Ukraine’s EU accession, without explaining what led to the switch, leaving Hungary as the holdout.

Sabotage inside Russia

All this behaviour from Hungary and Slovakia has convinced Ukraine that the two EU members have been acting in collusion with Moscow, and that energy was merely their latest excuse for holding Ukraine’s loan and EU membership hostage.

Many Europeans agree and do not blame Kyiv for its reluctance to repair the Druzhba pipeline.

“The whole idea of saying to Ukraine, ‘Now fix the hole the Russians have made in order that we can persuade Orban to lift a veto over the 90 billion’, it’s so extraordinary,” said Catherine Fieschi, a scholar on European politics at Carnegie Europe, a think tank. “The Europeans have been so dismal on a number of these issues that Ukraine is right to kick us up the backside,” she told Al Jazeera.

Ukraine now appears to be doing just that: shutting down Druzhba for good by attacking its pumping stations deep inside Russia, and presenting Europe and Russia with force majeure.

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) set fire to the Kaleykino oil pumping station in the Republic of Tatarstan, a thousand kilometres (621 miles) from Ukraine, on February 23. The station feeds Western Siberian oil into the Druzhba pipeline.

On April 21, the SBU attacked the Transneft-Privolga pumping station in Samara, damaging five 20,000-tonne tanks of crude that feed Druzhba.

The strikes on Druzhba’s infrastructure have had an impact beyond exports to Hungary and Slovakia.

Reuters estimated last month that they had played a role in depriving Russia of 40 percent of its total export capacity, and that the disruption of flows through the Druzhba pipeline had forced Russia to cut its oil production by half a million barrels a day compared with late 2025.

Peter Magyar, Hungary’s incoming prime minister, has said he will hold another referendum on Ukrainian accession. Not everyone is sure that it will result in a yes vote, or that other EU members will vote yes.

“The Hungarians were great to hide behind,” said Fieschi.

“Things are going to get so much tougher on the accession front. And this time, France will have to say what it really means, as will Germany, as will the Netherlands,” she said. “There’s going to be a really uncomfortable clarification moment. And I think  we’re about to step into it.”

Indian-administered Kashmir – Rashid Ahmad Mughal was barely six when armed rebels barged into their home in Chunt Waliwar village, in Ganderbal district of Indian-administered Kashmir, on a freezing January night in 2000.

At about midnight, nearly a dozen armed men broke the window by force and entered the Mughals’ home, where six people were asleep – 23-year-old Ishfaq, his 20-year-old sister Naseema, and younger brothers Ajaz, 8, and Rashid, 6, besides their two cousins.

The rebels had come looking for Ishfaq, who, the family admitted, worked for the Indian army, which controls the region.

“He tried to flee,” Naseema recalls, “but they shot him.”

As the family raised an alarm, the rebels took Ishfaq’s body and fled into the dead of the night.

Since then, the Mughal siblings have been hoping for the return of his remains so that they can perform his last rites in accordance with Islamic traditions.

As the siblings waited for more than 26 years for closure on losing Ishfaq, another tragedy hit them last month.

On March 31, Rashid, now 32, was shot dead by the Indian army for being a suspected rebel.

The army said it launched an operation along with the police in the Arahama area of Ganderbal after receiving “specific intelligence input” on the presence of “terrorists”, as Indian authorities and the media describe the rebels.

The army said Rashid was killed during an exchange of fire with the rebels in a forest. But the residents reject the claim, calling it another instance of a “fake encounter” – staged extrajudicial killing of suspects by the Indian forces.

In a further blow to the Mughal family, Rashid’s body was buried 80km (50 miles) away in a graveyard marked for alleged rebels in the frontier town of Kupwara – a practice followed by the army in recent years to prevent the eruption of street protests.

Only Ajaz was allowed by the authorities to attend the funeral.

The Kashmir conflict

The killing of the two brothers over 26 years – one killed by suspected rebels and the other by the army – in many ways encapsulates the tragedy unfolding in Kashmir for decades.

Kashmir is a disputed Himalayan territory divided between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, but claimed by both in full, with neighbouring China also controlling a sliver of its land. An armed rebellion erupted on the Indian side in the late 1980s. To crush it, New Delhi sent nearly a million soldiers, with the conflict since then killing tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians.

Anti-India sentiments in the Muslim-majority region intensified in 2019 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing government revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted partial autonomy to Kashmir, and brought the region under New Delhi’s direct control by dividing it into two federally-administered territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

Modi’s government defended the revocation by claiming it would end the armed rebellion and bring lasting peace to the region. However, nearly seven years later, Kashmir continues to remain on the edge, with incidents of suspected rebel attacks, as well as alleged extrajudicial killings, torture and preventive detention of residents continuing to dominate headlines.

The Mughal family belongs to Kashmir’s Gujjar community, a nomadic Muslim tribal group that historically sided with the Indian state. When the armed rebellion broke out in 1989, the forest-dwelling Gujjars were seen as the “eyes and ears” of the Indian forces for sharing intelligence and, at times, assisting troops in operations against the rebels.

Over time, however, this relationship has frayed. Once trusted as a front-line community, the Gujjars and Bakarwals – the two main tribes in the region – now increasingly find themselves under pressure from the very system they once supported.

Since the 2019 abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, at least 11 Gujjars have been killed in suspected extrajudicial encounters, while more than 10 have suffered serious injuries, allegedly due to torture in custody, marking a stark shift in the fortunes of a community once central to India’s security apparatus in the region.

Government policy changes have added to their concerns. Alterations in quotas affected the marginalised community’s access to jobs and education, triggering protests and resentment. They have also faced eviction drives and displacement, with authorities accusing them of illegally occupying forest land and demolishing their seasonal shelters.

‘My brother wasn’t a rebel’

Today, the Gujjars find themselves increasingly vulnerable amid evolving security challenges. Rashid’s killing is seen by the community as part of that pattern.

As soon as the news of the killing spread in Kashmir, hundreds of people hit the streets, rejecting the army’s claims that he was a rebel and demanding an investigation into the March 31 “encounter”.

“I was busy with my work when I received a call from a local police official, saying that my brother had met with an accident and that I should reach the police station immediately,” Rashid’s elder brother, Ajaz Ahmad Mughal, a daily wage worker, told Al Jazeera.

When Ajaz reached the Ganderbal police station, he was taken to another station in Srinagar, some 30km (20 miles) away, where he saw a body lying inside an ambulance.

“The police said your brother was a militant and that he was killed by the army in an encounter,” said Ajaz. “His face was mutilated, apparently to hide his identity. I identified him with his feet.”

Rashid was a commerce graduate – the only one in the impoverished village – and therefore helped the mainly illiterate people in his community in accessing essential government documents.

On the day he was killed, Rashid had left his home with the documents of some people he was helping – like he did every day before returning home by the evening.

“However, this time, he didn’t return and his phone was switched off,” Ajaz recalled.

The next morning, news about the army operation in nearby forests spread in the area. That is when, said Ajaz, people came to know about Rashid’s killing.

“We were absolutely devastated. How did my brother, who was a civilian until the day before, suddenly turn into a militant?” he asked.

Ajaz said the clothes Rashid was found wearing when he saw his body did not belong to his brother, alleging the security forces put the clothes on him after the killing. The family asked why Rashid was never questioned or arrested by the police if he was an armed rebel.

As protests and questions over the killing grew, the New Delhi-appointed governor of the disputed region ordered a magisterial inquiry into the killing. The authorities said a probe will be completed within seven days. It has been nearly a month now, and no inquiry report has yet been published.

Al Jazeera reached out to the army and the regional police for their statements on the family’s allegations, but received no response.

However, a police official, on condition of anonymity since he was not authorised to speak to the media, told Al Jazeera the decision to return Rashid’s body to the family would be taken based on the “nature of the inquiry report” submitted by the magistrate.

The police official also said Rashid had no adverse police records and that he had never been summoned for questioning for any rebellion-related case.

‘Prepared a grave for Rashid’

Even as the government investigates the killing, the Mughal family doubts it will lead anywhere, noting that numerous such probes ordered in Kashmir in the past yielded little or no outcome.

Experts say such probes by magistrates, who are members of the same bureaucracy that governs the region, lead to little or no remedial action.

“The very least that can be done is a time-bound probe by a judicial magistrate answerable to the chief justice of a high court,” Ravi Nair, executive director of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, told Al Jazeera.

According to data compiled by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), there were at least 108 cases of rights violations by the Indian forces between 2008 and 2018, where probes were ordered, but no one has been prosecuted to date. JKCCS is now a defunct rights organisation after its founder, Khurram Parvez, was arrested under a stringent anti-terror law in 2023.

In 2018, the Indian government informed the parliament that it received 50 requests from the then-regional government for the prosecution of security forces accused of rights violations. It denied sanction in 47 cases, while the matter is still pending in the remaining three.

Since the onset of the armed rebellion in 1989, between 8,000 and 10,000 people have disappeared in Kashmir, according to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), which represents the families of the missing.

As of December 2025, government data shows that the region recorded the highest number of arrests under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for five consecutive years. In 2021, the federal government informed the parliament that as many as 33 custodial deaths took place in Kashmir between 2016 and 2021. The next year, an analysis of data provided by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) revealed 38 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings in Kashmir – the highest in India that year.

Human rights experts say the 1990 Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a controversial law that provides impunity to the army in Kashmir, acts as a legal shield for the accused members of the security forces.

Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera that despite several cases of extrajudicial killings in Kashmir and families clearly identifying the alleged perpetrators, not much action has been taken by the authorities.

“Unfortunately, there is a culture of impunity that has perpetuated such abuses. The Defence Ministry restricts sanction to prosecute soldiers, while the Home Ministry has shielded paramilitary forces,” she said, demanding a repeal of the AFSPA “and all other laws that provide security forces immunity from prosecution”.

“Justice and accountability are key to lasting peace,” she said.

Praveen Donthi, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, an international think tank, says India’s 2019 move to revoke Article 370 was aimed at “fully integrating Kashmir into the union and end[ing] separatism and militancy”.

“However, seven years down the line, the situation remains precarious. The conflict is far from resolved, and militancy still has the capacity to ramp up at will,” he said.

“The pressure on security forces to maintain peace and stability may be leading to procedural errors and excesses.”

However, retired Indian army commander, DS Hooda, argues that the army “does not tolerate such incidents and has taken action if they found any wrongdoing by their soldiers”.

“It was an army investigation that revealed that one of the officials was involved, and the accused was punished by the army court,” Hooda said, referring to a staged killing of three civilians dubbed as rebels by the army in Kashmir’s Shopian area in 2020.

The army later acknowledged its soldiers exceeded powers under the AFSPA law and sentenced an accused soldier to life imprisonment. He was later suspended by an armed forces tribunal.

“The army carries out its own investigation. There is no impunity and if they find anything wrong, they take action. This is not an organisation thing.”

But the Mughal siblings say they had never thought a tragedy that struck them 26 years ago would return in such a devastating way, reopening old wounds and leaving them once again searching for answers and closure.

They say their suffering has not ended, with the years only deepening their grief as they wait for the return of the remains of their siblings.

“We have prepared a grave for Rashid. We will bury him in our own graveyard,” says his sister Naseema. “It will feel as though he is close to us.”

“From the depths of the Atlantic to the disastrously melting ice-caps of the Arctic, the commitment and expertise of the United States Armed Forces and its allies lie at the heart of Nato, pledged to each other’s defence, protecting our citizens and interests, keeping North Americans and Europeans safe from our common adversaries,” he said.