Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban says it is important for Russia's relations with the EU to return to normal following a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, who in turn described Budapest as an "old and faithful partner."

Putin was meeting with Orban at his residence outside of Moscow, after the pair met a year ago in Hungary.

"We are all interested in relations between Russia and Europe returning to normal and this is in the interest of Russian and Hungarian relations," Orban mentioned.

The two parties agreed to extend a gas deal, which will see Russia supply Hungary until the end of 2019. About 85 percent of Hungary's gas flows from Russia.

Last year, Putin and Orban signed a new gas deal that replaced a 20-year contract that expired in December 2015. Under the agreement, Budapest is paying only for the gas it actually consumes, as opposed to the volume it contracts, making it a lucrative offer for the low-demand client.

Putin said he's happy with the quality of relations between Russian and Hungary, though he accepts there has been a drop in trade.

Earlier today WikiLeaks released a classified report about the work of Operation SOPHIA, the EU military intervention against so-called "refugee boats" off the coast of Libya, WikiLeaks said in a statement.

The program was started only six months, so the release of secret files would show the effectiveness of the operation.

The report, dated back to January 29, 2016, was written by Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino, the commander of the Operation SOPHIA, for the EU's Military Committee and the EU's Political and Security Committee.

Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin resigned on Feb. 16, a Kyiv Post source in his office said.

"Yes, he resigned," the source said.

Several Ukrainian media outlets also reported Shokin's resignation, citing their own sources.

The reports came shortly after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he'd asked his appointed prosecutor, who has failed to bring a single major criminal case to trial in a year, to leave.

"The prosecutor general, unfortunately, wasn't able to win the support of society. So now the issue of the resignation of the prosecutor general is on the agenda," Poroshenko said after the meeting with Shokin. "The same approach should be also applied to the government."

Shokin's deputy Yury Sevruk told the Kyiv Post that Shokin had been on vacation since Feb. 15.

Shokin has been under fire for months by his critics, who accused him of stalling reform in the Prosecutor General's Office, and covering up cases of corruption among his subordinates.

A vote of no-confidence on the ousting of PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk's government has failed to secure enough votes in the Ukrainian parliament. The result comes despite President Petro Poroshenko's call for the PM to step down and protests against the current cabinet head.

Only 194 MPs supported to the motion, out of the required 226 on Tuesday, although the lawmakers had previously denounced the cabinet's work saying it had been unsatisfactory.

"To restore confidence in government the president urged the General Prosecutor and PM to resign," said Svyatoslav Tsegolko on his Twitter account.

Activists who want to make the streets of Estonian cities safer should address the national police volunteer organization instead of joining anti-migrant patrols organized by suspicious organizations with questionable aims, the country's defense minister said.

The organization Soldiers of Odin that first emerged in Finland is now also gaining popularity in Estonia. According to the Delfi media outlet, its members are planning to conduct regular street patrols to keep a close eye on refugees. The country has received fewer than 1,000 since the 1990s, and none of the current EU-established quota of 550.

According to open data on Facebook, there are up to 5,000 members of Soldiers of Odin in Estonia. Some of them, Eesti Päevaleht newspaper reports, are high-ranking military officials and members of Kaitseliit (Defense Union), Estonia's volunteer paramilitary unit and an integral part of the national military.

Estonia's Minister of Defense Hannes Hanso has spoken against the members of the national military joining groups with "unclear goals." Law enforcement functions should be reserved for state structures, Hanso said. "Those eager to contribute to the security of the society should side with police voluntary helpers, which stand guard over the values of democratic society, have fulfilled the necessary training and have no criminal past," the minister said.

Hanso made a point that every serviceman and Kaitseliit member has sworn to protect the Estonian state and all of its citizens not selectively but as a whole entity, stressing that patrols of self-proclaimed groups would never help to ensure the feeling of safety of the citizens, and lead "rather to the contrary."

According to the Turkish president, the country won't stop its attacks against Kurdish fighter posts in Syria.

Turkey will continue attacks on Kurdish fighter posts in Syria in return to alleged attacks by the Syrian Kurds, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's call for a no-fly zone (NFZ) over Syria is a risky strategy, going by historical precedents. Since their introduction in the '90s, there have been some significant fails.

After Russia's increasingly bold military engagement in war-torn Syria in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite bloc, the regional Sunni powers -- Turkey and its ally, Saudi Arabia -- have felt nervous and incapable of influencing the civil war in favor of the many Islamist groups fighting Assad's forces.

Most recently, the Turks and Saudis, after weeks of negotiations, decided to flex their muscles and join forces to engage a higher-intensity war in the Syrian theater. This is dangerous for the West. It risks provoking further Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, and sparking a NATO-Russia confrontation.

After Turkey, citing violation of its airspace, shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet on Nov. 24, Russia has used the incident as a pretext to reinforce its military deployments in Syria and bomb the "moderate Islamists." Those are the Islamists who fight Assad's forces and are supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Russian move included installing the advanced S-400 long-range air and anti-missile defense systems.

The US President has claimed that Russian involvement in Syria is a sign of weakness and has pressed for regime change in Damascus, brushing aside ongoing peace talks and ignoring steady gains by the Syrian army and Kurdish forces against terrorists.

"If somebody's strong, then you don't have to send in your army to prop up your ally," President Barack Obama said on Tuesday, taking a break from the ASEAN summit in California to speak to the press about the US Supreme Court and the Syrian crisis.

"They have legitimacy in their country, and they are able to manage it themselves, and then you have good relations with them," Obama added. "You send in your army when the horse you're backing isn't effective."

In Ankara and Riyadh a decent night's sleep must be hard to come by nowadays, what with the prospects of the Sunni state they'd envisaged being established across a huge swathe of Syria slipping away in the face of an offensive by Syrian government forces that is sweeping all before it north of Aleppo, threatening to completely sever supply lines from Turkey to opposition forces in and around the city, and all but ensuring that its liberation is now a question of when not if.

The success being enjoyed by government forces and its allies on the ground is a testament to their remarkable morale and tenacity despite the battering they have endured over five years of unremitting conflict. Key to this re-invigoration and success in routing opposition forces - forces which only a few months ago were in the ascendancy - has of course Russian air, communications, and logistical support. Moscow's decision to intervene at the end of September last year may have been pregnant with risk, but so far it has been validated, and perhaps even beyond initial expectations.

Moscow, not Washington, is calling the shots in the region now, announcing the birth of a multipolar world and marking an astonishing recovery given the parlous state of Russia throughout the 1990s as it struggled to recover from the demise of the Soviet Union. No sooner was the hammer and sickle flag removed from atop the Kremlin than a procession of crazed free marketeers descended from the United States, and elsewhere in the West, to impose neoliberal nostrums in return for an IMF loan that was necessary in order to avert complete economic collapse. The record shows that rather than this collapse being averted it was accelerated by the structural adjustment reforms implemented by Yeltsin and other Russian converts to the new religion.

In Washington at the time 'end of history' triumphalism reigned as oh how they laughed. Well, they're not laughing now.