In his preview of today’s NFP report, Goldman’s Delta One head wrote that “NFP almost feels like a sideshow at this point. You can argue weak labor data gives a Warsh led Fed enough cover to cut, but with oil and input inflation still elevated there’s also an argument that a weakening labor market alongside a constrained Fed is actually the more difficult combination for risk assets.” With that in mind, moments ago the BLS reported that in April the US added a red hot 115K, above the median consensus of 65K (and near the upper end of the forecast range which peaked at 133K), down from an upward revised (for once) 185K (originally 178K). This was the first back to back gain in jobs in a year.

The change in February jobs was revised down by 23,000, from -133,000 to -156,000, and the change for March was revised up by 7,000, from +178,000 to +185,000. With these revisions, employment in February and March combined is 16,000 lower than previously reported

A look below the surface reveals a less impressive picture: while payrolls rose to a new record high, actual employment has dropped to the lowest since January 2025…

… as the monthly change in payrolls has disconnected dramatically from actual jobs, which dropped by 226K in April and are now down 4 months in a row!

Also worth noting: while it’s seasonal, in April the US saw 391K jobs added only in speadsheets thanks to a surge in Birth/Death model adjustments, the highest since October, and clearly a revision of the previous trend of revising birth death adjustments lower.

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%, in line with expectations, which is odd since all major ethnic groups saw their unemployment rate increase…

… while the Labor Force Participation Rate dipped to 61.8% from 61.9%. The employment-population ratio, at 59.1 percent, changed little in April. These measures edged down over the year after accounting for annual population control adjustments. 

Wage growth came in cooler than expected, rising 0.2% MoM, below the 0.3% expected, and translating into a 3.6% annual increase, also below the 3.8% expected.

Some more details from the April report:

• The number of people jobless less than 5 weeks increased by 358,000 to 2.5 million in April. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was essentially unchanged at 1.8 million and accounted for 25.3 percent of all unemployed people. 
• The number of people employed part time for economic reasons increased by 445,000 to 4.9 million in April. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs.
• The number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job changed little at 6.1 million in April. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.
• Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of people marginally attached to the labor force changed little at 1.8 million in April. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was also little changed in April at 475,000. 

Looking at the composition of the report, employment edged up by 115,000 in April, after showing little net change over the prior 12 months. In April, job gains occurred in health care, transportation and warehousing, and retail trade. Federal government employment continued to decline. 

• Health care added 37,000 jobs, in line with the average monthly gain of 32,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, job gains occurred in nursing and residential care facilities (+15,000) and home health care services (+11,000).
• Transportation and warehousing employment increased by 30,000 in April, reflecting a gain in couriers and messengers (+38,000). However, employment in transportation and warehousing is down by 105,000 since reaching a peak in February 2025.
• Retail trade added 22,000 jobs in April. Employment increased in warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other general merchandise retailers (+18,000) and in building material and garden equipment and supplies dealers (+13,000). These gains were partially offset by job losses in department stores (-7,000) and in electronics and appliance retailers (-2,000). Retail trade employment had shown little net change over the prior 12 months. 
• Social assistance continued to trend up in April (+17,000), reflecting a gain of 24,000 jobs in individual and family services.
• Federal government employment continued to decline in April (-9,000). Since reaching a peak in October 2024, federal government employment is down by 348,000, or 11.5 percent. Federal employees on furlough during the partial government shutdown were counted as employed in the establishment survey because they worked or received (or will receive) pay for the pay period that included the 12th of the month.
• Employment in information continued to trend down in April (-13,000). Telecommunications lost 3,000 jobs, while employment continued to trend down in motion picture and sound recording industries (-6,000) and in computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services (-4,000). Information employment is down by 342,000, or 11.0 percent, since its most recent peak in November 2022.
• Employment showed little change over the month in other major industries, including mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction; construction; manufacturing; wholesale trade; financial activities; professional and business services; leisure and hospitality; and other services.

Visually:

A few things stood out here: the monthly increase in courriers and messengers (i.e. DoorDash delivery(, +38K, was the highest since covid!

Government was also notable: total government jobs have now declined every month since October, and arr down 9 of the past 10 months.

But that is nothing compared to the depression in the Information sector, where jobs are now down every months since 2024!

Finally, looking at the quality composition of the jobs report, we find that in April, the US added 123K part-time jobs, while 424K full-time jobs were lost.

The drop in full-time jobs dragged the total number of full-time workers to levels last seen in December 2024!

The only silver lining: after plunging at the end of 2025 and start of 2026, and after a big drop in March, native-born workers rose by 341K in April, while foreign-born dropped by 326K.

In short, this was a much uglier jobs report than the clearly “nudged” headline indicates, although we doubt that anyone in the market will notice when all that matters if whether memory stocks today have momentum or not.

Russian cities and communities are busy preparing Victory Day WW2 memorial events all across the country ahead of Saturday, and so security is already on edge and on high alert, especially in the Moscow area, given that Ukraine’s devastating cross-border drone attacks have persisted and expanded of late.

On Friday air traffic at 13 airports across southern Russia was suspended after drones struck a building at a regional air navigation center in Rostov-on-Don, Russia’s transport ministry confirmed. This was the crucial air traffic control center for the whole region, and so its being taken offline has had significant impact.

Regional media has listed that it halted flights to and from airports in Astrakhan, Vladikavkaz, Volgograd, Gelendzhik, Grozny, Krasnodar, Makhachkala, Magas, Mineralnye Vody, Nalchik, Sochi, Stavropol and Elista.

“The regional air traffic control center in Rostov-on-Don, which manages air traffic in southern Russia, has been temporarily adjusted due to the Ukrainian drone strike … personnel are safe, and equipment is being assessed” to determine whether operations can be restored, the ministry said on Telegram.

According to the Amsterdam-based Moscow Times, “Aeroflot, Pobeda, Nordwind and Rossiya Airlines said they were adjusting their flight schedules for Friday and would need to cancel some flights. At least 14,000 passengers were stuck due to delays and cancellations, the Association of Tour Operators of Russia said.”

“Russia’s Transportation Minister Andrey Nikitin asked major airlines to coordinate with the state-owned Russian Railways and the Unified Transportation Directorate to arrange for trains and buses to transfer passengers from canceled flights,” the report noted.

On the same day, over 260 drones were intercepted across various sectors of the country – which suggests that in total at least several hundreds were sent. Once again, some of them reached as far away as the Perm region in the Ural Mountains.

The drone waves have continued despite that Russia unilaterally announced a ceasefire corresponding with V-Day events commemorating victory over Germany in WW2. The ceasefire runs May 8-10; however, Ukraine has not acknowledged this.

Still, the Defense Ministry is acting as if it is on and it is official, having announced in a statement Friday morning that it has observed 1,365 violations by Ukraine since midnight.

✈️ A couple of drones paralyzed Russian aviation — airports are collapsing again

UAVs struck the building of the “Air Navigation of Southern Russia” branch in Rostov-on-Don. Operations at 13 airports have now been suspended.

Aeroflot is massively cancelling and delaying… pic.twitter.com/9A3B8XowAX

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) May 8, 2026

The Kremlin is putting the Ukrainian capital on notice, telling foreign diplomats to evacuate in the instance that Ukraine’s military tries to disrupt Saturday celebrations in Moscow and Red Square.

Russian leaders have wared Kiev will get pummeled in an unprecedented bombing if President Zelensky orders any drone attacks on Moscow. He had actually appeared to threaten precisely these events during remarks earlier in the week.

SoftBank Group’s abrupt scaling back of a planned $10 billion margin loan backed by its roughly 13% stake in OpenAI – now targeting as little as $6 billion – reveals deepening lender unease over the AI giant’s $852 billion post-money valuation set in March 2026.

The move follows earlier $40 billion bridge financing and comes amid reports that OpenAI missed internal revenue and weekly-active-user targets earlier this year.

While the loan itself is SoftBank’s problem, the episode carries real risks for OpenAI.

The clearest danger is a loss of valuation momentum (a down-round!).

Reuters reports that lenders, including banks and private-credit funds, balked at assigning reliable collateral value to unlisted shares in a company whose secondary-market demand has already cooled.

With sellers reportedly outnumbering buyers and rival Anthropic drawing stronger interest, the episode reinforces perceptions that OpenAI’s headline valuation may be frothy.

This could make future capital raises more expensive or dilutive, especially if OpenAI needs additional funding to service its enormous compute commitments – estimated in the hundreds of billions over the next few years.

An anticipated IPO, once seen as straightforward at premium multiples, might now face haircuts or heavier scrutiny from public-market investors wary of missing-growth signals.

SoftBank’s own leverage adds indirect pressure.

The Japanese conglomerate is one of OpenAI’s largest backers and has layered significant debt atop its AI bets.

Should credit markets tighten further or OpenAI’s performance lag, SoftBank could face margin calls or be forced to sell secondary shares – flooding an already thin market and driving down perceived value.

That, in turn, might erode employee and partner confidence, complicate talent retention in a hyper-competitive sector, and chill the broader AI investment narrative that has sustained OpenAI’s sky-high spending.

While none of this is immediately existential – OpenAI retains strong revenue growth, marquee partnerships, and Sam Altman’s (circular) deal-making clout – the SoftBank loan retreat is a tangible warning: private-market exuberance can evaporate quickly when lenders demand proof that eye-popping valuations match real cash flows.

If sentiment sours further, OpenAI could find itself navigating a far narrower runway than its $852 billion price tag once implied… and as OpenAI goes, so goes the hyperscalers’ budgets as the circular financing of all this spend breaks down with any chinks in the armor of of OpenAI’s exponential growth expectations.

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump said on May 7 that he had been briefed on a hantavirus cluster tied to a cruise ship and that he was hopeful that the situation was still contained, as federal health authorities track the American passengers who returned home. The president also said he expected more information on Friday.

Trump offered his assessment to reporters regarding the outbreak aboard the MV Hondius, which had passengers from multiple countries, including the United States. The vessel was traveling from Ushuaia, Argentina, through Antarctic waters and made various stops before reports of severe respiratory illnesses began to emerge.

“It’s very much, we hope, under control,” Trump told a reporter from ABC News.

“It was the ship. And I think we’re going to make a full report about it tomorrow. We have a lot of great people studying it. It should be fine, we hope.”

Trump was then further pressed by the reporter on whether Americans should be concerned.

“I hope not,” he said. “We’ll do the best we can.”

The president noted that officials planned further announcements on the matter. Public documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirmed the U.S. government is following the situation closely with U.S. travelers aboard the ship. The State Department is leading a coordinated response, including contact with passengers and engagement with domestic and international partners.

“We have a lot of people—a lot of great people are studying it,” Trump said.

According to CDC statements, the risk to the American public is described as extremely low. Health officials in at least several states are monitoring individuals who disembarked from the affected vessel. No widespread transmission among the general population has been seen, according to available public health updates.

Hantavirus infections, generally tied to rodent exposure, can cause serious respiratory issues. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported cases related to the ship, such as confirmed infections and fatalities among passengers of various nationalities.

The CDC notes on its website ongoing technical cooperation with international partners on the outbreak.

The CDC has gathered experts on the specific hantavirus strain in question, revealed by the South African Ministry of Health on May 5 to be the Andes variant, which is understood to be capable of person-to-person transmission under limited circumstances.

Hantavirus has a history in the Americas.

The CDC has noted hundreds of cases in the United States over decades, particularly linked to rural rodent contact, not travel clusters.

This ship-associated outbreak stands out for its scale and setting, leading to rodent control reviews and sanitation assessments per international ship health guidelines.

The WHO said on May 7 that there are eight cases linked to the cruise ship, including the three individuals who died amid the outbreak. Five of the cases have been confirmed to be Hantavirus.

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

• The final components of ITER’s central solenoid magnet — a 59-foot, 3,000-tonne superconducting system 15 years in the making — have arrived in France, clearing a major path toward first plasma.

• ITER will never supply electricity to the grid; it exists purely as a research tool, and at €22 billion and counting, it’s still years from achieving its primary milestone.

• A wave of well-funded private fusion startups is on track to hit the same technical benchmarks as ITER faster and more cheaply — raising real questions about the megaproject’s relevance even as it celebrates progress.

The world’s biggest nuclear fusion experiment just got one huge step closer to completion. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, France just received the final shipment of necessary components to assemble the giant magnet at the heart of the reactor. The central solenoid magnet, developed in the United States at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a critical component of the massive experimental site, which is cooperatively funded and operated by a coalition of seven major world economies: China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.

The central solenoid is awe-inspiring in its size as well as its capabilities.

“The central solenoid is 18 meters (59 feet) tall and 4.25 meters (14 feet) wide, composed of six individual modules,” Interesting Engineering reported earlier this week.

“Each module weighs more than 122.5 tonnes (135 tons) and is wound from 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) of niobium-tin superconducting cable.”

And this is just one component of a jaw-droppingly massive apparatus that represents “the grandest scientific experiment in the world“. ITER’s tokamak (the donut-shaped device designed to confine plasma with ultra-powerful magnets) measures a kilometer in length. The solenoid magnet as its core is therefore almost inconceivably powerful, and it’s just one part of a much bigger and more impressive system. “This component belongs to a magnetic system weighing 3,000 tonnes (3,300 tons) that interacts with nine vacuum vessel sectors,” Interesting Engineering goes on to say.

This beating heat of ITER has been 15 years in the making, with each individual module requiring a two-year process for fabrication and testing. ITER will never produce power to supply to the energy grid, but will serve as one of the most important – if not the most important – research projects on Earth to solve the puzzle of creating commercial nuclear fusion, the holy grail of clean energy. Nuclear fusion is the energetic process that powers our own sun. Replicating that process here on Earth could essentially provide limitless clean energy. It’s a potentially long-lasting, ultra-efficient energy source that leaves behind zero greenhouse gases and zero hazardous radioactive waste, unlike nuclear fission.

But the scale of ITER, and the unprecedented nature of its goals, has led to increasingly long timelines and a ballooning budget for the slow-moving megaproject. While the delivery of the solenoid marks a major milestone, ITER is still years away from achieving first plasma, around €22 billion and nearly two decades after breaking ground.

ITER is still relevant, and will hopefully bring us invaluable scientific findings that would be impossible without its grand scale and budget. But the megaproject is facing increasing competition from smaller and more dexterous fusion ventures. Various other projects are on track to beat ITER to its mapped goalposts, and much more inexpensively.

The race for nuclear fusion is increasingly going private as investors start to recognize the technology as a matter of when, and not if. Interest from the tech sector is also ramping up as Silicon Valley scrambles to find a panacea to the energy monster that the AI boom has unleashed. As a result, a lot of deep-pocketed entities are now focused on fusion like never before.

“If you know how to build a fusion power plant, you can have unlimited energy anywhere and forever. It’s hard to overstate what a big deal that will be,” Bill Gates wrote in an October essay.

“The availability and affordability of electricity is a huge limiting factor for virtually every sector of the economy today. Removing those limits could be as transformative as the invention of the steam engine before the Industrial Revolution.”

A new rush of Wall Street-backed fusion startups is already answering this call to arms, rapidly changing the scientific and economic landscape for nuclear fusion research everywhere. But ITER’s backers argue that its looming obsolescence is a sign of the project’s success rather than its failure, indicating that its achievements and high profile have inspired the current flood of private investing dollars into fusion research and development. And, if nothing else, ITER now stands as a vanishingly rare symbol of international cooperation for global interests, rather than nationalized and protectionist energy agendas.

The SOC Investment Group is a union-aligned shareholder advocacy organization formerly known as CtW Investment Group. It works with union-sponsored pension funds to mount pressure campaigns against public companies.

SOC’s latest pressure campaign appears to target Elon Musk’s SpaceX in an attempt to delay or derail the upcoming IPO.

The union-affiliated pension fund adviser, linked to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – a labor union that has supported the left-wing, billionaire-funded “No Kings” protest against President Trump…

… has asked regulators to review the accuracy and reliability of SpaceX’s financials, ensure auditor independence, and examine accounting around transactions with other Elon Musk-linked companies, including xAI and Tesla.

The InfluenceWatch database via Capital Research Center shows SOC’s ties with lefty unions… 

To note, SOC is weirdly obsessed with unhinged globalist ESG investment activism that damaged the U.S. economy during the Biden-Harris regime years.

SOC warned that investors could be exposed to SpaceX, whose valuation may decline once its financial disclosures are independently reviewed. Oddly enough, SOC is not a SpaceX shareholder but has previously pushed governance pressure campaigns at major companies, including Tesla.

“We are specifically concerned that SpaceX’s IPO will expose numerous investors, many unwillingly, to a company whose value may decline once its financial disclosures can be independently assessed and verified,” the letter said.

SpaceX is preparing to go public in less than two months, and SOC’s letter to regulators appears intended to create regulatory friction with the SEC over what could become the largest IPO in history. The timing is very notable.

A successful SpaceX IPO at a multi-trillion-dollar valuation could dramatically expand Elon Musk’s wealth and power, potentially transforming him into the world’s first trillionaire.

From an information and political warfare lens, SOC’s pressure campaign should be viewed less as a SpaceX governance issue and more as part of a broader left-wing operation against Musk’s corporate empire.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Childcare workers across Wales are being trained to spot and report “racist incidents” by toddlers under fresh guidance endorsed by government ministers and bankrolled with taxpayer cash.

The push, which includes lessons on “white privilege,” turns playgroups and nurseries into surveillance hubs for the state’s ‘anti-racism’ agenda — even when the alleged offenders are barely out of nappies.

The initiative has received over £1.3 million in taxpayer funding via the Welsh Government.

🔴 Welsh nurseries have been advised to report children for “racist incidents” in hate crime guidance backed by the Labour government.

The taxpayer-funded guidance has been circulated in order to make nurseries, play groups, and childminders “anti-racist” environments.

🔗:… pic.twitter.com/FcL6M0Jw3n

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 5, 2026

The guidance comes from Diversity and Anti-Racist Professional Learning (DARPL), based at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

It has been circulated to more than 300 nurseries, playgroups and childminders.

Staff are ludicrously told to assess whether a child’s behaviour could amount to a hate crime and, if so, contact police on 999 or 101.

Welsh nurseries told to report ‘racist’ toddlers to POLICE under Labour-backed guidancehttps://t.co/Mfkhj0TayO

— GB News (@GBNEWS) May 6, 2026

The document also pushes workers to audit their resources for “diversity,” discuss skin colour and race with very young children, and create “anti-racist” environments from the cradle.

The toolkit explicitly frames even child-to-child incidents in toddlers as potential “racist incidents” requiring formal logging and possible police involvement.

Critics rightly call it Orwellian madness — toddlers lack the cognitive development to hold racist beliefs, yet the state now demands they be policed as miniature thought criminals.

This latest outrage fits a clear and disturbing pattern of UK authorities targeting children with woke, pro-migration and Islam-compliant ideology while stamping down on any pushback.

Here are just some of the recent examples:

Local authorities warned schools that kids’ artwork risked violating Islamic blasphemy rules — a staggering concession to foreign religious law over British freedom of expression.

State schools are feeding children propaganda that frames illegal Channel crossings as something to celebrate rather than challenge.

The government instructed teachers to monitor and report any “anti-Muslim hostility,” turning classrooms into surveillance states for wrongthink.

A taxpayer-funded Prevent-style game literally flags children who question open borders as potential extremists.

Parents of a child who questioned why he had to celebrate Ramadan in school when he is not a Muslim were sent a letter informing them of the ‘racist’ incident.

Together these stories paint a grim picture: British children are being systematically stripped of innocence, taught to view their own heritage and skin colour as problematic, and conditioned to accept mass migration, Islam’s sensitivities and woke dogmas without question.

Questioning any of it risks being labelled a bigot, an extremist or, in the case of toddlers, a “racist” warranting a police report.

This is not education. It is ideological grooming funded by your taxes and enforced by a Labour government that has lost touch with reality — and with the British public.

Parents are right to be furious. The only answer is to push back hard before an entire generation is lost to this madness. Childhood should be about play, wonder and discovery — not state-mandated guilt sessions and police reports for playground squabbles.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

In a rare outbreak of sanity from the continent that perfected kicking the can, officials on NATO’s eastern front are openly admitting what Brussels and Frankfurt have spent years denying: you can’t fund a permanent war footing with infinite borrowing and hope the bond market never notices.

Estonia’s outgoing ECB rate hawk Madis Muller dropped the red pill in parliament Thursday, bluntly telling lawmakers that jacking up budget deficits to pay for the defense surge is no long-term solution. “These higher defense expenditures are not temporary,” he warned. The message: the party is ending, and the tab is about to get ugly.

Next door in Latvia, Finance Minister Arvils Aseradens echoed the warning, calling for “every possible instrument” to secure sustainable funding. He even threw support behind Canadian PM Mark Carney’s pet idea of a multilateral defense bank, because nothing says fiscal responsibility like creating yet another supranational borrowing vehicle to paper over the cracks.

Both Baltic states, sitting on the razor’s edge with Moscow, not to mention sharing a border with the Russian bear, have massively ramped up military outlays in recent years. Their spending has exploded even as existing social welfare commitments continue to balloon budgets already teetering under the weight of Europe’s sacred model. Welcome to the European conundrum in 2026: you need guns to deter Russia, but the welfare state can’t be touched, and nobody wants to tell voters the truth about taxes.

The broader picture across the continent is grim. European nations are scrambling to square exploding public debt with an unfunded defense boom while somehow still pretending they can keep the lights on for Ukraine’s war effort. The math simply does not add up.

Estonia’s Debt Trajectory: From Poster Child to Problem Child

Estonia, the euro-area’s former fiscal hawk with just 1.3 million people, now finds itself in the crosshairs. Its debt-to-GDP ratio remains a relatively modest 24%, but that’s changing fast. Public debt is projected to more than double: from €10 billion ($11.8 billion) in 2025 to €21 billion by 2030. The IMF has already raised concerns, and Fitch downgraded the country’s sovereign rating back in 2023 as investors began pricing in geopolitical risk and demanding higher yields.

On Thursday, Estonia’s central bank doubled down on its earlier warnings: act now while you still have the luxury of being one of the EU’s least indebted nations. Because that window is closing fast.

Tallinn’s much-touted “defense tax” introduced in 2024? Already watered down and nowhere near enough to cover the actual sums required.

This is the inevitable endpoint of Europe’s post-2022 panic: politicians who spent decades hollowing out defense budgets in favor of green deals, migration costs, and generous entitlements suddenly discover they need actual military capability. Rather than make hard choices — cut elsewhere, raise taxes transparently, or rethink open-ended commitments — the default instinct is to borrow more and hope the ECB or some new “defense bank” magically makes the numbers work.

Spoiler: it won’t.

The Baltics are simply saying out loud what markets have been whispering for months. Permanent defense hikes require permanent revenue, not more creative accounting and supranational debt vehicles. Europe’s eastern flank is learning the hard way that you cannot deter Russia with PowerPoint slides and growing interest payments.

The real question now isn’t whether Europe will boost defense spending, it will and will then quietly shuffle most of the funds into various green (and not so green) grifts under the guise of an “existential threat.” It’s who ultimately pays – and whether the bond vigilantes will wait patiently for the answer. Given the trajectory, the real question is when does the emperor’s nudity finally get confirmed.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Hungary has returned money and valuables belonging to Ukrainian state-owned bank Oschadbank after authorities seized the shipment earlier this year while it was being transported from Austria to Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the return on Telegram on Wednesday, saying the assets had been seized by Hungarian special services in March, a move he claimed had been unjustified.

“Today, the funds and valuables of Oschadbank, seized by Hungarian special services in March of this year, were returned,” Zelensky wrote.

“I thank Hungary for the constructive and civilized step,” he added.

The shipment, which reportedly included cash and gold belonging to Oschadbank’s Ukrainian branch, was stopped by Hungarian authorities during a period of high tension between Budapest and Kyiv.

Hungarian officials said at the time that the bank workers involved were suspected of money laundering.

The Ukrainians were later released, but the authorities retained the seized assets until now.

The incident occurred during Hungary’s parliamentary election campaign last month, when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had made criticism of Ukraine a central part of his political messaging.

His government was also locked in a dispute with Kyiv over the interruption of Russian oil supplies through Ukraine to Hungary via the Druzhba pipeline.

Orbán, who had long clashed with Ukraine and its European backers over sanctions, aid, and energy policy, was defeated in April’s election.

Péter Magyar, the leader of the Tisza party, will now succeed him, and the new Hungarian parliament is expected to be sworn in on Saturday.

The return of the Oschadbank assets follows a broader easing of tensions between Budapest and Kyiv.

Despite multiple claims from Ukraine during the election campaign that the Druzhba pipeline could not simply resume due to damage inflicted by Russian shelling, Kyiv promptly resumed the flow of oil to Hungary and Slovakia shortly after Orbán’s election defeat.

At the same time, Budapest stopped blocking final approval of a €90 billion European Union loan to Ukraine.

Read more here…

Russia is seething after its Caucasus regional ally Armenia decided to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a European summit earlier this week.

Moscow is further warning against Yerevan pursuing closer relations with the European Union as well. The Kremlin slammed Zelensky being hosted there, right in Russia’s own backward, as “incomprehensible”.

“Russian society, with deep indignation and bewilderment, not only saw but remembered that Armenia, which we are used to considering a friendly, brotherly country, served as a platform. For whom? For a terrorist,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday.

“The current, illegitimate Kyiv regime has been issuing threats to strike Moscow during the annual parade on May 9, a day sacred to our peoples… And no one in Armenia’s current leadership rebuked Zelensky. So whose side of history are you on?” she posed.

“Such a course by the Armenian authorities will sooner or later lead to Yerevan’s irreversible involvement in Brussels’ anti-Russian line, with all the ensuing political and economic consequences for Armenia,” she said.

However, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has responded to the pressure, stating: “Back in 2022-2023 I already stated that, on the issue of Ukraine, we are not an ally of Russia.”

He is also reportedly refusing to attend Moscow’s Victory Day parade on Saturday, saying he needs to stay in his country in order to prepare for parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7.

Armenia has long been a key member of the regional Russian-led bloc, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). However, Armenia froze its participation since 2024, outraged over Russia’s failure to protect ethnic Armenians during Azerbaijan’s 2023 takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russia since played a ‘peacekeeping’ role with some limited troop deployments, however, Armenian Christians had already been booted from the ancient enclave.

Russian MFA tells Armenian ambassador: UNACCEPTABLE to provide platform for Zelensky to voice TERRORIST threats against Russia

VIDEO: Zelensky meeting Armenia’s Pashinyan in Yerevan on Monday pic.twitter.com/AfyL0J8bqO

— RT (@RT_com) May 7, 2026

So relations have been fraying, to say the least. PM Pashinyan made clear Thursday: “We have sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and I have said that we are not allies of Russia on the issue of Ukraine.”