As Hungary’s PM exits the stage, Russia is on the hunt for a new disruptor. Can any other nationalist leader appease the Kremlin?

Roland Oliphant

Roland Oliphant is The Telegraph’s Chief Foreign Analyst and co-host of the Battle Lines podcast. He was previously its Moscow correspondent and has covered wars, revolutions and elections from across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Prior to The Telegraph, he worked for The Moscow Times

Published 14 April 2026

He was Vladimir Putin’s best friend in the European Union, a pugilistic disruptor unafraid to leverage the war in Ukraine for his own government’s interests or wage his own ruthless assault on European institutions.

Viktor Orban’s departure from the Hungarian and European stage not only changes the political landscape in the Carpathian Basin, it also deprives Moscow of the nearest thing it could call a friend inside the bloc.

Now, who are Russia’s remaining allies in the European fold? And can the Kremlin hope to make a new Orban out of any of them?

“Orban was a friend to Putin [in part] because it was useful to him,” says Sam Greene, professor of Russian politics at King’s College London. He says finding a like-for-like replacement will not be easy. “I don’t think it’s as simple as a football coach who needs to say: ‘Next man up.’”

But there are potential candidates. Here are the men Putin may be looking to sway next.

The frontrunners

The most likely candidate to take Orban’s place is the leader of Slovakia. Robert Fico, like the former Hungarian leader, is a pugilistic nationalist populist who delights in puncturing Brussels’ orthodoxies, including around Russia and Ukraine.

He is, along with Orban, one of only three European leaders to meet with Putin in Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As Orban did, Fico runs a country that is heavily dependent on Russian energy. Cheap energy is vital not only for consumers – as in Hungary, it also underpins an export-oriented economy based on the post-1989 eastward migration of Western manufacturers in search of cheaper wages.

Fico’s embrace of Russian talking points is not entirely performative. He does not have the kind of rapport with Putin that Orban had, however. And Slovakia, like all the other former Communist members of the EU, except what used to be East Germany, is a net recipient of EU funds.

Orban might have been unafraid of picking fights with the hand that fed him – even if it led to Brussels withholding a total of some €35bn (£30bn) in EU funds intended for his country. But Fico, says Oleg Ignatov, a senior Russia analyst at Crisis Group, has neither the appetite nor the domestic political security for such confrontation.

It is worth remembering that even Orban almost always gave in to Brussels in the end.

“Fico is in a similar position – he can use his outsider status or challenger status for domestic political purposes, and for the purposes of negotiations with Brussels. But at the end of the day, he knows that Russia can’t provide Slovakia with what Europe can. So there are limits to the degree to which he’s willing to push that. And Orban has just made those limits clear,” says Greene.

Further west in Prague, the billionaire, Andrej Babis, presides over a coalition government made up of his own populist Action for Dissatisfied Citizens (SFO) party, the far-Right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party and a single-issue party representing car owners.

Like Fico and Orban, he is a figure viewed with some suspicion among the European mainstream and with a degree of favour in Moscow. In December last year, he joined Orban and Fico in refusing to guarantee the EU’s €90bn loan package to Ukraine.

He has also repeated the unfounded Russian claim that Boris Johnson scuppered an early peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in 2022, and backed Orban’s calls for Europe to talk directly with the Kremlin. But he has also tried to keep some distance between himself and the other two Central European populists.

He about-turned on a pre-election promise to cut the previous government’s Czech-led initiative to buy ammunition for Ukraine. And he has personally pledged to safeguard Nato and EU membership, despite his SPD coalition partners wanting out of both organisations.

“We do not have the same position as Slovakia and Hungary,” he said after the decision on the loan in December when asked to explain his middle-of-the-roadism. “We support Ukraine. We do not wish to guarantee the loans. Slovakia and Hungary refused any support.”

Like Fico in Slovakia, he is a nationalist – not someone emotionally or ideologically tied to Russia. And like Hungary and Slovakia, the Czech Republic is a net recipient of EU funds. Those are the nearest the Kremlin has to what could be called partners – they are certainly not allies – in government in the EU today. But there are multiple elections approaching in other countries that might change that picture.

Other candidates

Take Bulgaria. There, Rumen Radev, the Eurosceptic, pro-Russian former president, is poised to win the country’s eighth general election in five years on Sunday. The Kremlin would certainly consider that a favourable outcome. Radev has criticised the European policy of arming Ukraine and denounced a 10-year security deal with Ukraine signed by the current government.

But Bulgaria is the EU’s poorest member and even more reliant on Brussels largesse than Hungary or Slovakia.

While most analysts believe a Radev victory would put a stop to the past few years of political chaos in the country, he will probably have to manage with a minority government. He is a long, long way from being an Orban-style power broker.

Russia briefly scented another European ally on the Danube in 2024, when the far-Right, pro-Russian Freedom Party took the largest share of the vote (29 per cent) in a general election. Unable to find willing coalition partners, it was eventually frozen out of government by a coalition of conservatives, social democrats and liberals who took a more orthodox view of foreign policy, EU membership and Austria’s traditional neutrality.

A new Russian “friend” in the mould of Orban nearly took power in neighbouring Romania two years ago, when a virtually unknown pro-Russian and anti-Nato candidate called Calin Georgescu won the first round of the November 2024 elections.

But, the Romanian supreme court ordered a rerun amid allegations of Russian interference – including an apparently coordinated campaign on TikTok. The follow-up election in 2025 was won by independent centrist, Nicusor Dan, dashing Moscow’s hopes for an Orban-like ally in Bucharest.

But the election the Kremlin will be watching most closely of all is in France, which will choose a successor to Emmanuel Macron in April next year. “They will be watching what happens in France. It is very important for Europe,” says Ignatov. But for the Kremlin, says Ignatov, the fantasy of a Moscow-Paris axis is probably just that.

Marine le Pen, the daughter of the founder of National Rally, has in the past echoed the Russian orthodoxy that it was Nato expansion that caused the war in Ukraine. But she has been banned from running because of an embezzlement conviction. Jordan Bardella, her protégé and the party’s actual candidate, has called Russia a multidimensional threat. So the National Rally may not be quite the friend the Kremlin had hoped.

For Moscow, says Ignatov, almost anyone would be better than Macron, because the current relationship could not possibly get any worse.

A similar dynamic can be seen in Germany, where Alice Weidel, the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), has tried to rein in the more overtly pro-Kremlin voices in her party. That effort has been stymied by outspoken allies, including Tino Chrupalla, her co-leader, who last year said Poland was more of a threat than Russia.

The party continues to espouse openly pro-Russian policies. This week, the AfD adopted a manifesto before regional elections in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt that says: “The current anti-Russian policies of the established parties… are not in Germany’s interests.”

Perhaps the Kremlin’s greatest shock came from Italy, where Giorgia Meloni has taken the populist Right in an entirely different geopolitical direction. In opposition, she was as Eurosceptic and Moscow-friendly as anyone else on this list, advocating improved ties with Russia and praising Putin as a defender of European values.

But after coming to power in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she became one of the most articulate defenders of Ukraine on the European Right. The departure of Orban represents the triumph of her Atlanticist version of the European populist movement over his Russia-leaning wing.

The Kremlin would be wise to note how the European nationalist movement has learnt how damaging the wrong kinds of friends can be, argues Greene.

Several figures in the European populist Right have clashed or parted ways with Donald Trump’s administration in recent months, despite the assumption of some in the White House that they could be counted on as allies.

The reasons vary from fury over JD Vance’s insulting remarks about European veterans of the war on terror, Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and the suggestion that Europe ought to get involved in the war with Iran. Vance’s unfortunately timed visit to Budapest to endorse Orban last week could well come to be seen as a clear example of how associating with Trump has become a liability with voters.

Ultimately, politicians overwhelmingly act in their own self-interest when it comes to the friendships they keep – be that in the West or the East.

As Greene says, Russia’s relationships in Europe are “situational ones that it is happy to take advantage of when they’re there”. “But these are also situational relationships that all of these politicians are happy to take advantage of,” he adds.

Just as with Orban, the Kremlin’s friends in Europe may polish Putin’s ego in exchange for favourable gas prices, but they will also continue to swing back to the West when Europe offers its own carrots.

“None of these people are pursuing a pro-Russia policy because they’re inherently pro-Russian. They’re pursuing the policy that works for them domestically and works for them with Brussels,” says Greene.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/14/putin-loses-best-friend-orban/