Sign "O" the Times

@mchastain81 It's cool. Just a NATO ally signing secret nuclear deals with Vladimir Putin.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) March 4, 2015

I wish that Tweet were a joke, but even if it were it would be a seriously unfunny joke. Here’s the story from Ukraine Today:

The details of a deal with Russia to expand Hungary’s only nuclear power plant will remain secret for the next 30 years. The two countries agreed to keep the details of the agreement classified due to what they are calling security reasons.

Observers, such as Transparency International, say the agreement is illegal because it seeks to hide information about public works deals.

Under the agreement, Russia will supply around USD 11 billion to finance most of the constrution of two new reactors for the Paks nuclear power plant.

It’s all very technical, I’m sure we wouldn’t understand [cough, cough].

You might remember a few months ago, I went into Serious History Geek Mode and wrote a lengthy article about the history of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia — a tiny bit of Europe long fought over by Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechoslovaks, and maybe briefly by even the Moldovans and the Turks. The impetus for that admittedly niche column was a story about Moscow and Budapest working together to distract Kyiv from the action on its eastern front:

In its efforts to promote secessionist ideas among the half-million-strong Rusin community along Ukraine’s Western border, Moscow is simultaneously pursuing three goals. First, it is forcing Kyiv to divert its attention from Russian aggression in the east to another theater, thus limiting the ability of Ukrainian forces to counter what Moscow is doing in Crimea and Donbas (eastern Ukrainian region encompassing the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk). Second, it is cementing an ever closer relationship between Vladimir Putin and the increasingly pro-Moscow Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, a government that presents itself as a defender of the Rusins against Ukrainians. And third, Moscow is suggesting that if Kyiv continues to resist, Russian forces could dismember Ukraine to the point that it would be a landlocked republic with no direct access either to the Black Sea or to the countries of Central Eastern Europe.

I’ll remind you that Hungary is a member of the European Union and ostensibly a NATO ally. And yet there’s been talk — and action — for months that the country is leaning pro-Moscow.

This is just one of the many pieces of rotten fruit resulting from six years of President Look At Me Looking At Me leading from his behind.