What’s in a name? These days…not much.
The European Union does not include Ukraine; nevertheless and notwithstanding the objections of E.U. members Hungary and Slovakia, the European supra-state insists on paying the salaries of Ukraine’s government bureaucracy while that nation’s martial-law-holdover-president, Volodymyr Zelensky, fights to maintain control over a breakaway region that has rejected Ukrainian rule since the 2014 coup d’état of Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization does not include Ukraine; nevertheless and notwithstanding the objections of NATO members Hungary and Slovakia, the American-led military alliance insists on sending money and weapons to the Kyiv regime warring with the Russian Federation over territories whose people overwhelmingly identify as Russian. Former Dutch prime minister and current secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, has stated on multiple occasions that the military alliance would continue to help defend non-NATO-member Ukraine.
According to Ukraine’s newly appointed, thirty-something-year-old defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine has over two million draft dodgers and a quarter of a million active-duty troops who have gone AWOL. So NATO is protecting a non-NATO country whose men refuse to fight. NATO is assisting a Kyiv dictatorship that depends almost entirely upon conscription (including the violent “busification” of “recruits” after draft officers break into vehicles and homes with drawn weapons).
While the E.U. and NATO fight Russian authoritarianism by protecting Ukrainian authoritarianism, both institutions have remained relatively quiet as member states sustain actual attacks. Seven months after Russia moved to annex the Russophone regions of Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipelines transporting natural gas from Russia to Germany were sabotaged and made inoperable. German, Dutch, and French energy companies own interests in the pipelines. Subsequent German investigations have identified a dozen Ukrainian suspects, including members of a Kyiv diving school where military personnel train. Several independent journalists have concluded that Ukraine’s military carried out the underwater demolition of the Nord Stream pipelines.
If Ukraine’s government was, in fact, responsible for the destruction of the pipelines, then Ukraine (a non-NATO member) destroyed property belonging to NATO members. Ukraine’s alleged act of sabotage cut off Russia’s inexpensive natural gas from most of Europe. (Prior to the war, Russia supplied 45% of the E.U.’s natural gas imports.) So the destruction of the pipelines has raised the cost of energy (and the price of finished goods transported within the Union) for European citizens. NATO continues to protect a nation that may have directly attacked members of the military alliance.
Similarly, Ukraine has caused an international incident with regard to the European-Russian Druzhba (which means, “friendship”) Pipeline that was jointly constructed to transport Russian oil to Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Last year, Ukraine’s military bombed several pumping stations servicing the pipeline. This year, Ukraine’s government claims that Russia attacked the Ukrainian section of the Druzhba Pipeline (a claim the Russian Federation denies), effectively halting all deliveries of Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia. As both nations are almost entirely dependent upon this oil supply, the pipeline’s inoperability has created a major energy crisis for citizens of Hungary and Slovakia.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico blame Ukraine for the oil shutdown. Ukraine’s president/dictator Zelensky says he has no intention of repairing the pipeline. After Hungary and Slovakia blocked additional sanctions on the Russian Federation and a ninety-billion-euro gift (a loan that never needs to be repaid) for Ukraine’s regime, Ukraine’s military destroyed another critical transit node of the Druzhba Pipeline in Russia.
President/Dictator Zelensky also made a little news two weeks ago when he directly threatened Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán’s life: “We hope that in the European Union, one person will not block the ninety billion [euros]. Otherwise, we will give this person’s address to the armed forces, to our guys, let them call him and talk to him in their own language.” Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó condemned Kyiv’s thuggish “culture”: “This is the man Brussels admires and the country they want to fast-track into the European Union….No one can blackmail us just because we refuse to pay the price of Ukraine’s war and refuse to accept higher energy prices because of Ukraine.” Prime Minister Orbán took the Ukrainian threat on his life in stride, saying: “There will be no deals, no compromise. We will break the Ukrainian oil blockade by force. Hungary’s energy will soon flow again through the Friendship pipeline.”
Orbán followed up by very publicly intercepting part of Zelensky’s alleged money-laundering operation running through Hungary. Foreign Minister Szijjártó revealed that Hungary had already confiscated Ukrainian “mafia” funds that included tens of millions of U.S. dollars, tens of millions of euros, and a few million dollars in gold bars. In addition, the foreign minister has alleged that several billion dollars worth of currency and gold have been transported through Hungary to Ukraine in the last two months.
A former Ukrainian general who once oversaw Zelensky’s intelligence service and secret police was detained in Hungary in connection to the suspected money laundering. An angry Zelensky again threatened to send Ukraine’s “special military operators” to Prime Minister Orbán’s home.
In response to Zelensky’s increasingly belligerent behavior, Prime Minister Fico urged the European Commission to distance itself from Zelensky’s “outrageous blackmailing statements.” The best that the Commission could do was a short statement from its deputy chief spokesperson, Olof Gill, in which the Eurocrat clinically observed: “Specifically in relation to the comments made by President Zelensky, we are very clear as the European Commission that that type of language is not acceptable. There must not be threats against EU member states.”
At the same time, E.U. leaders pledged to provide for Ukraine’s budgetary needs for at least the next two years.
Ukraine is effectively waging an economic/energy war against Hungary and Slovakia. Hungary and Slovakia are members of the E.U. and NATO. Ukraine is a member of neither. Nevertheless, the E.U. and NATO continue to take Ukraine’s side. It is as if “unions” and “alliances” mean nothing.
In fact, the E.U. is not hiding its disdain for Hungary’s Orbán. Brussels has made it very clear that it prefers Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party to oust Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary’s upcoming parliamentary elections. The European Commission has activated its Rapid Response System to “combat potential Russian online disinformation campaigns” in Hungary. The E.U.’s handpicked “fact checkers” will use the powers of the new Digital Services Act to decide when online public debate qualifies as “disinformation” that must be censored.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee recently concluded that the E.U.’s Rapid Response System almost exclusively targets so-called “right-wing” and “populist” political candidates. The European Commission has extended its online censorship campaign to one week after Hungary’s elections, allowing Eurocrats to monitor and censor public conversations concerning the election’s legitimacy. While E.U.-funded NGOs work to oust Prime Minister Orbán, E.U.-funded censors will be in a position to label allegations of European election meddling as nothing more than “Russian talking points.”
Just as in Romania, Moldova, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, the E.U. will use its army of paid “influencers” and propagandists posing as “journalists” to manipulate the outcome of Hungary’s elections. To “save democracy,” Brussels’s Eurocrats believe that they are entitled to choose each nation’s leaders.
They don’t want Orbán because Hungary’s current prime minister continues to block the E.U.’s funding for Ukraine. Brussels would do anything for martial-law-holdover-president/dictator Zelensky and non-E.U. Ukraine. But allowing the citizens of E.U.-member Hungary to vote for their own national interests? That simply won’t do.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.