@DAaronovitch My suspicion is that they play this role on behalf of Russia. It's essentially laundered Russian influence. Just a strong hunch. Orban has been in Putin's camp for longer than people realise.
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Matthew Dickie
11.2K posts
The amount of money that Hungarian government spends on soft power influencing is truly prodigious. Scratch any new right organisation and you will find some reliance on cash from Budapest.
Miklós Szánthó@MiklosSzantho
🗣️ At today's press conference, my friend @mschlapp , the president of the @ConservativeFND , and I revealed a lineup of notable speakers, including @JMilei , @Alice_Weidel , and @PM_ViktorOrban 💪 #CPACHungary is about to kick off—stay tuned! 🥳
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Turkish user: “Even the most ardent pro-government newspaper in Turkey didn’t do this”
Fox News@FoxNews
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Barron Trump, the son of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, turns 20 today.
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Trump told MS NOW that Ukraine "did nothing" to help the US in the Iran war and said Zelensky's claims were just politics and PR. He added Zelensky is harder to deal with than Putin and said Putin has shown he isn't afraid of Europe. The reporter said Trump showed more trust in Putin than in US European allies.
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
New report on the chasm between the US & Israel’s end game:
“Israel is pursuing a scorched-earth campaign of regime change, which isn't our goal,” says senior admin official. “Bibi wants to wreck Iran’s economy & decimate its energy infrastructure. Trump wants to keep it intact”
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
And worth notingthat Trump’s people are suddenly making visits and deals in places like Hungary and Belarus with autocratic leaders where the US has little or no interests, but that are of high importance to Putin. This is not a coincidence.
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Someone called ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine and told them to leave or face violence. The calls came from Ukrainian-looking numbers. The voices claimed to be Ukrainian police.
Ukraine's SBU ran technical analysis and traced every call to Russia.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the operation feeds directly into Viktor Orbán's re-election campaign — which is built on the claim that Ukraine threatens Hungarians — and that coordination with the Orbán campaign cannot be ruled out.
🔗 euromaidanpress.com/2026/03/19/rus…
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
This is what Prigozhin did in Syria, and Marsalek tried in Libya. For over a decade Putin has been weaponising migration to undermine the EU - and with Farage’s Leave EU campaign and Syria, it worked to create Brexit
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 people convicted in fraud cases.
At the same time, he says he is waging a "war on fraud."
Those granted clemency included allies & donors.
Those targeted in the "war on fraud" include Somali & other immigrants. nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/…
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Former GB "News" presenter, Calvin Robinson calls James Orr his "good friend".
#bbcqt
Right Wing Watch@RightWingWatch
Last week, Calvin Robinson appeared on Joel Webbon's program, where he said that Jews are to blame for Muslim immigration and both groups must be kicked out of the country.
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
"We need to equip Ukraine with what it needs faster. Putin has been telling us for decades what he intends to do. History tells us to listen even if it’s deranged. Putin is rightly called a war criminal. Ceasefires for Putin are only an opportunity to reload."
- Hegseth (2022)
🪖MilitaryNewsUA🇺🇦@front_ukrainian
❗️"The United States should not send ammunition to Kyiv, but use it for its own interests," — U.S. Defense Secretary Hegseth.
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Hegseth announces that Ukraine is cut off.
Serving Putin is the core focus of the Trump administration.
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Holy shit..
Trump just opened up the Russian war machine to cash flows from the US.
Putin's puppet state of Belarus, a nation with a GDP the size of Vermont will now be a conduit for Russia to/from the US.
Trump is Putin's whore.
big ben@alternative_war
Another prostration to dictators: the US lifts sanctions on Belarus. Namely, Belinvestbank, the Development Bank of Belarus and the Ministry of Finance of Belarus, as well as the Belarusian Potash Company and "Belaruskali" have been removed from all sanctions lists, — Trump's special envoy Cole This is the result of today's meeting of the American delegation with Lukashenko in Minsk.
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I’m trying to draw out a visual mapping the connections & interrelationships among Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Iran, Antifa, the CIA, the Proud Boys, and other white supremacist/neo-nazi extremists, and just the first level of connections already looks like this. This is going to be wild once it’s organized.
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@JulianLahey3 @FeserEdward @SohrabAhmari @unherd Not all Never Trumpers. David Frum, David French, Charlie Sykes and all the Bulwark crew are still very much never Trump.
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@FeserEdward @SohrabAhmari @unherd "That first gave rise to the 'Never Trump' movement..."
Uhh yeah, but all the never Trumpers like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin love him now. I wonder why?
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From @SohrabAhmari: “Trump…has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent…The scale of [his] failures...return[s us] to the character problem that first gave rise to the Never Trump movement” unherd.com/2026/03/trump-… via @UnHerd
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Perhaps it was never a caricature...
Edward Feser@FeserEdward
From @SohrabAhmari: “Trump…has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent…The scale of [his] failures...return[s us] to the character problem that first gave rise to the Never Trump movement” unherd.com/2026/03/trump-… via @UnHerd
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@BDSixsmith @CathyYoung63 The Telegraph is just so ridiculous these days.
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An entertaining feature of this bizarre column is how it spends paragraph after paragraph asking, in stunned disbelief, how — HOW — anybody could oppose the war, then blithely admits at the end that it wind up with regional chaos and rampant terrorism.
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/1…
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
The only difference between the foreign policies of Russia and China is that China wants to wait a while before destroying the US, while Russia wants to do it right now.
NEXTA@nexta_tv
The U.S. is ready to draw closer to Russia to weaken China — Politico The Trump administration is considering reshaping its relationship with Russia to reduce China's influence. The White House believes that encouraging Russia to end the war in Ukraine and reintegrating it into economic cooperation with the West could shift the global balance of power in favor of the U.S. Economic incentives and investments are being discussed as ways to bring Moscow closer to Washington. However, in Ukraine and among experts, this strategy is met with skepticism, with reminders that similar attempts in the past have been unsuccessful, and the Russia-China alliance remains strong. Experts believe that at best, limited cooperation can be expected, but not a rupture between Moscow and Beijing.
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@TrumpVideoGame @Antunes1 He lost the 2020 election. He was lying about having won it, and still is. Because his personality disorder won't allow him to admit ever having lost.
You invaded the capitol building to try to overthrow the result of an election. You should still be in jail.
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
Sheesh. What the hell are we doing here?
Total amateur hour—and the stakes couldn’t be higher. This is an increasingly dangerous situation for Americans and the world, and we have no idea what we’re doing at the top.
Barak Ravid@BarakRavid
Contrary to Trump’s statements, senior Israeli and U.S. officials said that the United States had prior knowledge of the Israeli strike and even approved it in an attempt to pressure Iran. After the Iranians retaliated against Qatar’s gas fields, Trump is now changing course
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Matthew Dickie retweetet
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if infrastructure like this 👇 gets blown up, as of this moment it will take at least a decade to recover from this war - and the truth is that the world's energy picture is probably changed forever.
This single facility 👇produced roughly 20% of global LNG supply (aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/18…) and, as of 2011, had taken $70 billion to build (energyintel.com/0000017b-a7be-…).
What makes this even worse is that Iran's strike on this was retaliation after Israel attacked their South Pars gas field which draws from the same natural gas reservoir, which is the world's largest by far (9,700 km² - about the size of Qatar itself).
Heck, on the list of the 25 largest natural gas fields (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_n…) this single reservoir holds roughly 40% of their combined recoverable reserves - and is nearly 6 times bigger than the 2nd biggest field in the world. And, unlike many of the others on the list, it's only at 10% depletion (meaning 90% of the gas is still there).
Which means that, probably for many years, a huge share of the gas from the world's largest reservoir simply won't be extractable, as infrastructure on both sides - Qatar's and Iran's - has now been blown up.
From a global energy supply perspective, we're deep into worst-case scenario territory.
QatarEnergy@qatarenergy
QatarEnergy Statement on Missile Attacks on Ras Laffan Industrial City QatarEnergy confirms that Ras Laffan Industrial City this evening has been the subject of missile attacks. Emergency response teams were deployed immediately to contain the resulting fires, as extensive damage has been caused. All personnel have been accounted for and no casualties have been reported at this time. QatarEnergy will continue to communicate the latest available information. #Qatar
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