The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, support Ukraine, while trying not to overwhelm Vladimir Putin.
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As often in Hungary, the embarrassment of power reads in the silence of the media at its boot. In the morning of Thursday, February 24, at the beginning of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, it was necessary to wait several hours for the origo site, the admiral ship of the government media empire, talks about it in “one”. The Russian invasion poses a serious problem with the propaganda of Viktor Orban, the nationalist prime minister. Himing for years, his good contacts with Russian President, Vladimir Putin, can not go so far as to approve an invasion that reminds many Hungarians the crushing of the revolution in Budapest, in 1956. Especially a few weeks of Legislative elections of April 3, which are tightly announced.
Sunday, February 27, the Prime Minister went on television to defend his narrow ridge, that he summarized as follows: “Strategic calm.” “The most important thing is that Hungary remains outside this war” He said, while the country shares a long border with Ukraine, and tens of thousands of refugees have already fled to Budapest. As a result, on one side, Hungary supports all the sanctions decided at European level in recent days, a notable element while Mr. Orban kept criticizing those decided on Crimea, but without opposing it. But, on the other, it does not engage in any bilateral sanction and refuses to send weapons to Ukraine, or even those sent by other NATO countries transit through its territory.
A position on the opposite of his Polish, Czech and Slovak allies of the Visegrad Group, who, they, commit massively to support the Ukrainian resistance. Or even that of the very prorusse Czech President, Milos Zeman, who reported that he felt “blurred” by Mr. Putin. For this reason, the main opponent of M. Orban for the vote of April 3, the proeopean and pro-NATO Peter Marki-Zay, qualified as “servile mercenary” on the occasion of an organized event in front of the seat of the International Bank of Russian Investment, which has established Budapest under contested conditions in 2019. The opponent has requested the departure of what he has described as “Russian spies bank” and the suspension of the project of Construction of a nuclear power plant with the support of Rosatom in Paks, in the south of the country.
“Strategic calm”
But for the moment, the Hungarian power is opposed to any sanction on energy subjects in the name of the Hungarian consumer protection. Sign that this “strategic calm” is far from clear, the MEPs of FIDESZ, Mr. Orban’s party, found themselves to vote on Tuesday, March 1 in the European Parliament for a resolution on the Ukraine resuming the Hungarian opposition proposals, before having to deny their own vote in public … “The environment is very dangerous for Mr. Orban who finds himself to contradict his own policy, but I do not think he Suffers electorally as long as it does not break the European Unity, “says Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital Reflection Center.
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