Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Political Director Balazs Orban (no relation) is in the center of an artificially manufactured scandal over the important point that he recently made about the futility of Ukraine’s cause. He conveyed the ‘politically inconvenient’ fact that there was never any realistic way for Ukraine to achieve its maximum objectives in this conflict, ergo why it should have agreed to spring 2022’s draft peace treaty. Here’s what Balazs said according to Politico:
“Every country has the right to decide its own destiny, and leaders take responsibility. We probably wouldn’t have done what President Zelenskyy did two and a half years ago, because it’s irresponsible. Because obviously he put his country into a war defense, all these people died, all this territory was lost — again, it’s their right, it’s their sovereign decision, they had the right to do it. But if we had been asked, we would not have advised it.”
This was spun by his enemies as denigrating the memory of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, to which he responded on Facebook as follows per Google Translate:
“There is no stop on the war propaganda press train. Hungary’s position is clear: we don’t see the meaning of the Ukrainian-Russian war, which has been going on for more than two and a half years, in which hundreds of thousands of people died, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of territory were lost and a country was destroyed. For why so? For nothing.
The war should never have started or ended sooner by diplomatic means.
Everyone would have been so much better off. To confront the Hungarian heroes of 1956 with this current Hungarian position is the method of the foreign-financed propaganda press and the war party politicians, which I find outrageous and I refuse every time – as was said in the recent conversation! It would be nice if the war and the lying pro-war would finally end!”
Balazs then quote tweeted Politico’s abovementioned article and added the following comment:
“Fake news @POLITICOEurope ‼️
Let me be clear: the heroes of 1956 are our national heroes, and their memory is sacred. Period. However, we cannot equate 1956 with the current Russia-Ukraine war. For the past two and a half years, since the outbreak of the war, we have faced constant pressure from warmongering propaganda, and now they even dare to exploit the legacy of our 1956 heroes.
We will not give in. This war is not our war. While it’s in our neighborhood, we want to stay out of the conflict. Hungary’s pro-peace stance is firm, and we continue to advocate for an end to the war and the start of negotiations to restore peace in Europe.”
As can be seen, his simple but ‘politically inconvenient’ point is that Zelensky sacrificed land and people for literally nothing. Ukraine would have preserved much more of both had it agreed to spring 2022’s draft peace treaty, which former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sabotaged with outgoing Polish President Andrzej Duda’s tacit support. It was futile to keep fighting given the gross mismatch of forces, which is why this decision was so irresponsible.
Comparing and contrasting the Ukrainian Conflict with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 leads to some interesting insight. The latter was a short-lived insurgency that was quashed by the USSR. NATO calculated that it wasn’t worth risking World War III by backing the rebels, and while many locals sympathized with their cause, the vast majority didn’t want to risk their lives for it either. NATO’s strategic calculations were different in the Ukrainian Conflict though due to the end of the Old Cold War.
NATO obtained an unprecedented edge over the USSR’s successor state upon the incorporation of all the former Warsaw Pact countries and even the three former Baltic Soviet Republics. This emboldened it to turn Ukraine into an “anti-Russia” for the purpose of further weakening the West’s historic rival through indirect means. Putin finally had enough and forcibly pushed back with his special operation, which NATO then saw as an opportunity to wage a proxy war for inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia.
More average Ukrainians volunteered to participate in the early stages of this conflict than Hungarians did in their country’s 1956 Revolution due to how much more they were preconditioned by the West into hating Russia in the run-up to their respective conflicts. Ukraine also received direct Western military support, including heavy weapons, unlike the Hungarians nearly seven decades ago. The problem though is that even this was predictably insufficient for defeating Russia.
Ukraine was offered very generous terms for agreeing to peace shortly after the conflict broke out, but Zelensky’s head was pumped up by Johnson with the fantasy of utterly humiliating Russia, which Poland tacitly promised to help him achieve by facilitating NATO’s military aid to that end. Poland, the UK, and their shared American senior partner all knew that Ukraine would pay an immense cost for advancing their strategic interests vis-à-vis Russia by proxy, yet they still put it up to this herculean task.
They wrongly expected that the sanctions would cripple Russia’s economy in parallel with Ukraine masterfully exploiting its overextended military logistics to push their opponent back across the border, after which Putin would plead for peace without any preconditions and be appropriately punished. None of that came to pass, but the Anglo-American Axis and their Polish junior partner continued waging NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine even when it became clear that their plan was impossible.
The resultant costs have comprehensively crippled Ukraine, which Hungary foresaw and was thus inspired to do everything possible to promote peace, albeit to no avail. This context is required for understanding the importance of the point that Balazs recently conveyed as well as why the West was so enraged by it that they encouraged his enemies to lie about what he said in order to discredit him. More Westerners are realizing that Hungary was right, however, which is reshaping popular perceptions.
