FROM THE ANALYST

VICTOR ORBAN, CANNY AS EVER, SEES THE WAY THE WAR IS GOING

ORBAN, who once demonstrated against the Russian occupation of Hungary as a student, but is now eerily smitten with Putin’s autocracy.
Yet even he can see the eventual outcome of the war will not be what Putin envisaged.
In a radio interview yesterday, Orban recognised that, ‘if the Russians were going to defeat Ukraine they would have done so by now, but were not seeing it. We probably never will’.
He sounded disappointed.
There’s been talk that if Ukraine was defeated Russia would be willing to hand back an area of Ukraine on the border with Hungary and Romania known as Carpathian-Ruthenia, an area of Hungarian ethnic majorities inside Ukraine. One of Orban’s less than subtle issues is that of greater Hungary - where Hungarian speakers live inside Romania, southern Slovakia, northern Croatia and a huge part of Transylvania in Romania.
These areas were once controlled by the pre-1918 Kingdom of Hungary as part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
Today Orban and his Fidesz Party regularly use EU freedom of travel rules to enter Romania especially and stir up ethnic tensions with speeches and cultural exchanges designed to reinforce ethnic tensions. It’s all very reminiscent of Germany demanding the Czech owned Sudetenland in 1938.
Orban’s stooges were especially active when Ukraine was first attacked, but with time having passed and the Russian attacks patently failing to create any kind of victory scenario, these operations have calmed down. Perhaps at last, Orban will learn to stick to his own territory. With Putin unable to deliver the situation for Orban requires a little more tact. He may have to face after all, that he is loosing a ‘friend’ and has to live with his neighbours. Of course if Trump regains the presidency he’ll have another fanboy to deal with.
Yet ultimately if Orban cannot deliver on his ethnic purity dreams and his nationalist rhetoric gets nowhere, his own days may well be numbered.
Opposition in Hungary faces a deliberate series of obstacles to hinder their every move. But it won’t be enough if the government fails to deliver on what always were bloated and poorly idealised pie in the sky ideals based on historic principles long seen as those of another age.

@ukrainejournal