

Austria isn’t as blatant as Hungary but their policy is also pretty russia-friendly.
And there is a reason A-H collapsed and it wasn’t just because of WW1 and Bosnian Serbs. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians or basically anybody who wasn’t German or Hungarian hated the monarchy in the end(With the possible exception of the Croats, who reached some kind of agreement with Hungarians right before the collapse).
What is truthdig.com? They make a major revelation out of something that is obvious to anybody who spent just 5 minutes thinking about it. Ever since the Roman panem et circenses it is known that even the most authoritarian of dictators has to maintain some level of approval by the people he rules and can’t do everything he wishes.
Hitler had his KdF and still had to scale down his eradication of “undesirables” before the start of the war, putin has been bribing russians for more than 20 years with scraps from oil money and yet he can’t use conscripts in Ukraine.
It shouldn’t be therefore surprising that economic sanctions are enacted also against the population in hope that they will undermine the support for the government in question.