Why do similar small states pursue different foreign policy strategies when faced with geopolitical upheaval? The paper investigates this question through the comparative analysis of Czech and Hungarian foreign policy towards the Russia-Ukraine War between 2022 and 2025 using political speeches, public opinion polls, trade statistics, and previous research findings. Drawing on existing work on shelter theory and small state hedging, it makes two contributions to the literature. First, it develops a new conceptual language along with concrete indicators to describe the variation in European foreign policy responses to the war. Second, it stresses the importance of leaders’ foreign policy images conceptualised as the summary of how key decisionmakers view the present and the future of their existing alliance, that of competing power centres, and their own nation’s opportunities, to explain this variation. Empirically, the article demonstrates why leaders’ different perception of the world order and its trajectory is the key difference between Czech and Hungarian foreign policy regarding the Russia-Ukraine War.
