Eileen Gu defended her Olympic ski halfpipe title on Sunday to make it six medals in six events over her Winter Games career.

The 22-year-old Gu, American-born but competing for her mother’s homeland of China, is already the most decorated freeskier in the short history of the sport at the Olympics. She also captured two silver medals at the Milan Cortina Games, to pair with two golds and a silver from the Beijing Games.

Gu won the event on the strength of her second run, a clean, technically sound pass. She got even better in her final run — pumping his ski poles after landing the final trick — and finished with a score of 94.75. Her teammate, Li Fanghui, took silver and Zoe Atkin of Britain was third.

“She is unreal. It’s pretty crazy how good she is,” New Zealand’s Mischa Thomas said of Gu. “She is ‘Wonder Woman.'”

The event was rescheduled to Sunday following a big snowstorm the night before. It was a bright, sunny day as Gu shone in the final event at the Livigno Snow Park. She shielded her eyes from the sun to catch a peek of her winning score — and instantly liked what she saw.

There were quite a few Gu fans at the base of the halfpipe, holding up pictures of her and waving flags.

Atkin, an American-born skier who competes for her father’s homeland of Britain, soared high all contest, a staggering 5.4 meters (18 feet) above the pipe at one point. She finished ninth at the Beijing Games but has been a steady presence on World Cup podiums ever since. She has three victories over the last four years, all in events where Gu didn’t compete. The 23-year-old Atkin is the defending world champion.

In her second run, Thomas dropped into the halfpipe — and dropped her phone. It had to be retrieved for Thomas. After the competition, she reported: “My phone is great. Never been better.”

Svea Irving was a “DNS” — did not start — in the American’s second run. She returned for a third run but struggled to complete a maneuver and finished in 11th.

“It was pretty insane,” Thomas said on the broadcast of the competition.

Atkin took the lead after the first run with a smooth performance. Meanwhile, Gu lost her balance on her first trick and cut the run short.

Cassie Sharpe of Canada sat out the final after a hard crash in Thursday’s qualifying round. She won the gold in the event at the 2018 PyeongChang Games and silver four years later in Beijing.

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Budapest threatened to block a new package of European Union sanctions against Russia and to stall efforts to help Ukraine until Russian oil deliveries to Hungary resume.

The EU’s foreign ministers are set to meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss the bloc’s 20th round of sanctions against Moscow, a measure they hope will be approved in time to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Tuesday.

In a video posted to social media Sunday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said he would block the sanctions package, accusing Ukraine of deliberately holding back Russian oil deliveries through the Druzhba pipeline.

“We will not consent to the adoption of the 20th package of sanctions, because we have previously made it clear that until the Ukrainians resume oil shipments to Hungary, we will not allow decisions that are important to them to be approved,” Szijjártó said.

Russian oil shipments to Hungary and Slovakia have been interrupted since Jan. 27 after what Ukrainian officials say were Russian drone attacks that damaged the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian crude across Ukrainian territory and into Central Europe, leading to rising tensions between Budapest and Kyiv.

For the sanctions to pass, the 27-nation bloc needs to reach a unanimous decision.

Nearly every country in Europe has significantly reduced or entirely ceased Russian energy imports since Moscow launched its war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Yet Hungary and Slovakia, both EU and NATO members, have maintained and even increased supplies of Russian oil and gas, and received a temporary exemption from an EU policy prohibiting imports of Russian oil.

Szijjártó also said Saturday Hungary will block a major 90-billion-euro ($106-billion) EU loan to Ukraine meant to help Kyiv meet its military and economic needs for the next two years.

Earlier in the week, Hungary and Slovakia announced they would both cease diesel shipments to Ukraine over oil interruptions, and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico on Saturday said his country would cut off emergency electricity supplies to its embattled neighbor if oil deliveries were not restored by Monday.

Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who maintains the closest relationship with the Kremlin of any EU leader, has long argued Russian fossil fuels are indispensable for his economy, and that switching to energy sourced from elsewhere would cause an immediate economic collapse — an argument some experts dispute.

Orbán has frequently threatened to scuttle the bloc’s efforts to sanction Moscow over its invasion, and has blasted attempts to hit Russia’s energy revenues that help finance the war. He has also vetoed EU efforts to provide military and financial assistance to Ukraine.

Watched more than 1.3 million times since it was posted by Russian comedy group “Plyushki” to YouTube last month, the video comes with a disclaimer.

“Some of the jokes are based on wordplay and do not carry any religious, philosophical, or ideological assertion,” it says, acknowledging that comedy can be a risky business in Russia, where some have been jailed for jokes, particularly if they are thought to be critical of the war in Ukraine.

“Maybe there’s problems in the country,” one of the comedians said, a nod to the fact that addressing the country’s issues head-on could be dangerous. “There’s a lot of cameras here,” another replied, to laughter from the crowd, because the words for camera and jail cell are the same in Russian.

While there have been no repercussions for the group, others including Artemy Ostanin are not so lucky. The 29-year-old was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison by a Moscow court earlier this month after he was found guilty of inciting hatred for a joke about being tripped up by a disabled person. A second joke about Jesus Christ led to a conviction for offending religious believers.

They were brought to the attention of authorities in March by pro-government activists from a group called Zov Naroda, or Call of the People, which accused him of mocking a fighter who lost his legs in the war in Ukraine — a claim he denied, insisting the joke had been misinterpreted.

Aware that he could be in trouble, Ostanin fled to Belarus, only to be arrested and deported back to Russia. He told the Moscow courtroom that he was severely beaten in a forest and his hair was cut off by Belarusian security services, an independent Russian media outlet, Sota Vision, reported in its trial coverage.

Eva Merkacheva, a member of Russia’s Human Rights Council, also posted a picture on Telegram of Ostanin with heavy bruising and blood on his back.

Belarus’ interior ministry issued a statement on Telegram denying he’d been beaten.

Fellow stand-up Nikolai said his friend was “a convenient target” and the severe sentence was meant to scare other comedians into toeing the line. “It’s easier to harshly punish one person so the others live with the knowledge that it’s best not to take risks,” he told NBC News in an interview earlier this month.

NBC News agreed not to use the last names of the people interviewed inside Russia, over fears for their security.

A relatively new thing in Russia, stand-up comedy took off in the last decade after it was aired on TV, turning relative unknowns into huge stars.

Even today, “it’s hard to find a bar in Moscow that doesn’t host a stand-up gig at least once a week,” Nikolai said.

But “the state isn’t well-versed in humor,” according to Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with the rights group First Division, which specializes in defending people accused of political crimes and espionage. He added that authorities take “everything seriously and literally,” and Russia has introduced more laws that punish people for speech.

Among the more draconian was legislation introduced shortly after President Vladimir Putin launched what the Kremlin refers to as its “special military operation” in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Those found guilty of “discrediting” the Russian army could face up to 15 years in prison.

Previously, few topics were off-limits, including issues like the #MeToo movement, according to Anastasia, a 35-year-old artist from Moscow who regularly attended comedy gigs before the crackdown. She added that people took pride in how free and vicious Russian humor could be.

That changed dramatically after the war started almost four years ago, she said, adding that in the current climate, comedians “play it safe.” Before delivering their jokes, she said, some comedians will tell their audiences that they don’t want to offend them, while others will tell the crowd that they have a joke “but I won’t say it.”

As a result, she said, she was going to fewer gigs because a lot of the material became repetitive.

“Every time, we stoop to a whole new low. And there’s no end to it. We live in some kind of frightening mirror world,” said Anastasia, adding that although she wasn’t a fan of jokes about disabled people, she was frustrated by Ostanin’s prison sentence.

After 2022, Nikolai said, he removed material about the army because he had been heckled and told to stop joking about the war, and he’d heard others had been beaten up for doing so.

Some comedians who wanted to joke about those things have left Russia, among them Denis Chuzhoy, who performs in English using the name “Dan the Stranger,” a literal translation of his name in Russian.

Once popular in his homeland, he said his fortunes changed after he spoke out against the war. During a show in the northwestern city of Vologda, he recalled, two men stood up and handed him a funeral wreath with a ribbon that read “to Russia’s traitor,” one of the reasons he decided to relocate to Spain.

Today, comedians in Russia are “retelling wife jokes,” Chuzhoy, who now performs in both Europe and the U.S., said in an interview earlier this month. While he mostly jokes about death and depression, some of his posts on social media reference Putin and the Russian state.

The bravest comedian he’d seen recently on a video filmed in Russia did a routine “about the right way to eat pizza,” he said. As the comic held a pizza with two slices missing from the bottom, it eventually became clear that it “looks like a peace sign,” he said.

On the first day of the Ukraine invasion, he added, it was made clear to comedians performing on TV that joking about this was off-limits. “We’re making a comedy show, not a revolution,” they were told by show producers in group chats.

Those who defied the ban were threatened with “dismissal or criminal charges,” he said.

Even those who don’t appear to have criticized the war are not immune, like Nurlan Saburov, a popular comedian from Kazakhstan who earlier this month was banned from Russia for 50 years for “criticism of the special military operation, as well as violations of immigration and tax legislation,” according to the state-run TASS news agency.

In a statement on Instagram, Saburov said he did not want to comment on the situation and his lawyers were handling the matter.

Nonetheless, Nikolai said some political stand-up did still exist in Russia at a grassroots level. Comedians perform in front of loyal audiences of around 20 people “whom they basically know personally,” he said. “No one will even consider doing it on TV. No one’s suicidal,” he added.

Comparing stand-up in Russia to an electric fence, he said it was “easy to get through, but God forbid you brush the side — you’re dead.”

Back in Moscow, a soldier who lost his leg in the war in Ukraine stood on the stage of a show broadcast on Russian social media channel VK.

“I’m the only comedian who’s actually fought for every audience member,” he said, to cheers from the crowd.