The EU, which is closing down due to the war, and Hungary, which is constantly peeking out
February 28, 2022
The response of the EU and the Western world to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a spectacular and rapid closure. In the neighborhood, the fighting is getting bloodier and the civilian casualties are growing, while Moscow is becoming more and more isolated from the world (economy, sports, culture). Hungary is constantly lining up, but you can always look out from there – in the direction of Moscow.
Taboo-breaking western closure
By now, his team had clearly failed to achieve Russian military goals: the blizzard was unsuccessful, with a relatively large number of casualties, and the Russians had failed to take a larger city. The prolongation of the war is a failure for the Putin-led regime in both military, political and economic terms. And the Western world in the II. The end of World War II closes the existing taboos by closing one thing for sure: NATO does not want to send troops into the war zone, but still sends serious help to Ukraine.
- The EU, Britain, the US, Canada and Japan are imposing unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia: the withdrawal of major Russian banks from the global financial intermediation system (SWIFT) has already been a step that has hit not only the Russian oligarchs, the ruble has depreciated, even the average Russian understands that he is paying the price for war.
- The sanctions were also joined by Switzerland, which had historically taken care of its neutrality, and the assets of the Russian elite were frozen.
- Finland, which has played a militarily neutral role so far, is approaching NATO, as is Sweden (Moscow threatened them last week).
- With new US sanctions, it has already cut the Russian economy off the dollar.
- THE Germans in the II. for the first time since World War II, weapons and military equipment are sent to a war zone (this is a major turning point in German foreign policy) and they have announced that they will increase their defense spending.
- The EU is uniformly supplying arms to Ukraine to help with resistance, but several European countries have also offered arms separately.
- There have been reports from several EU member states that volunteers are going to fight in Ukraine, the Latvians have made it possible with the law – it is important that this does not mean that any EU member will send soldiers into the war.
- According to Josep Borell, the EU’s chief foreign negotiator, all EU members are committed to Ukraine’s military support.
- Ukraine wants to join the EU, President Zelensky has signed the application for membership (it is unlikely that this will go through an accelerated procedure, as Kyiv wants).
Although the Germans stopped licensing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – the pipeline would create a direct link between Russia and Germany, other than that, the sanctions left out one area: energy. This has been observed even with the introduction of the latest U.S. sanctions. For the time being, gas continues to come to Europe via Ukraine from Russia, although Europe has enough reserves until the end of the heating season.
Hungarian position: strength in unity, but…
In an interview with his public television on Sunday afternoon, Viktor Orbán also clarified Hungary’s position – the prime minister, who changed the word migrant to refugees before the war, said that Hungary did not want to drift into the conflict, but also said that unity was needed. nak.
- Hungary cannot do without weapons, nor can it send weapons or soldiers to Ukraine.
- Hungary is committed to peace.
- It is not necessary to be smart, but to be uniform, Orbán said about EU sanctions. He maintained his previous position that sanctions policy was not goal-oriented, but said it was true to the EU response.
- He denied that Hungary had blocked sanctions on SWIFT (this was not considered a good idea by several other EU member states before, but in the end there was a turnaround, and in the end everyone voted to sanction the big Russian banks).
Based on these, Hungary, together with the other members of the EU and the Western world, closed together against Russia, which was waging war. However, there are several strategic areas where it seems: Hungary has not broken at all with its separate path policy, ie by trying to keep an equal distance from the West and the East (this is called a two-bottle foreign policy).
Within the EU, Hungary has a particularly strong relationship with Moscow that goes beyond strategic factors.
Let’s see where Hungary goes.
They can’t carry guns through us
Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has just spoken in Kosovo today that Hungary will not consent to the transfer of weapons offered by the EU to Ukraine through the territory to the war zone. All countries in the region (Slovakia, Poland, Romania) have offered arms to all of Ukraine, but Hungary is the only one that has even refused to transfer arms. The foreign minister said they did not want to offer weapons to kill people where Hungarians live.
The argument is strange in that there was news of it before the military aid was offered: Hungarians already have victims of the fighting.
Also noteworthy is the location and timing of Szijjártó’s announcement.
The foreign minister is in Pristina, and just over the weekend, Kosovo has asked for a U.S. military base to be built on its territory and they have also announced they want to speed up their NATO integration. The Hungarian Foreign Minister said all this a day after the EU announced that it would send uniform weapons to Kiev. What has been said by Szijjártó has since been confirmed by Viktor Orbán In a Facebook video.
The antecedent of Szijjártó’s announcement was that in the morning a C-17 military aircraft with Hungarian insignia, but operated by NATO with an international team, carried a Dutch arms shipment to the Ukrainian border.
The seemingly fierce protest is hard to understand in the sense that Josep Borell had already announced on Sunday that the logistics center for arms shipments to Ukraine would be in Poland.
Thick 2
One of the most important questions is what the fate of Paks 2 will be, the project is already in a big slump, but the annual Orban-Putin meetings have so far always confirmed that the parties have undertaken to implement the project, largely with Russian credit. International treaties have been encrypted by the government, but it is known that we have already started repaying the Russian loan. My Rosary today said everything is going according to plan.
Confidence is also interesting because the Finnish power plant, which is considered to be a pilot project for Paks 2, seems to be failing in the permitting process.
After the outbreak of the war, the Finnish government decided not to allow them into a strategically important Russian industry.
Meanwhile, Romania has already tendered its new nuclear power plant units without the participation of the Russians.
International Investment Bank (ICB)
The investment bank with a Russian background moved its headquarters from Moscow to Budapest, which was also protested by American diplomacy. The bank enjoys a number of prerogatives from the Hungarian government, and its officials, for example, enjoy diplomatic immunity – in an EU member state. The bank was surrounded by suspicion from the beginning, saying that even the Russian services could send staff here, so the financial institution the term “spy bank” has been protested several times against.
The largest shareholder is Russia, the second largest is Hungary. Romania and the Czech Republic have also owned the bank so far, but they quit because of the war. So otherwise the Russians will have the majority ownership. Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria are also members for the time being, they have not yet announced whether they will stay in the bank. For the time being, it seems that Hungary will remain a more committed member of the ICC than the other members.
Russian propaganda
The EU has banned Russian state propaganda (RT) and Sputnik from broadcasting Russian state propaganda. The purpose of the step is to disinformation invented by the Kremlin dissemination is prevented. The Kremlin is trying to show that Moscow had no choice but to launch (more precisely, a “special military operation”), the aggressor rule is the West, NATO and Ukrainian President Zelensky himself (the Jewish president Putin himself has repeatedly referred to as ‘neo-Nazi’ and for its government as ‘drug addicts as a congregation’).
The Hungarian public media, controlled by the ruling parties, are trying to justify the Russian position with dubious “experts”, but the Kremlin’s kind narrative can also be found in the media belonging to the portfolio of the media foundation, KESMA, for national strategic purposes. As pointed out by 444, the publicly funded MTI news agency also cited the military conflict in the neighborhood as a war for the first time today. The M1, which operates as a news television, continues to broadcast Russian-language news in the evenings – an isolation of Russia in more and more areas of life outside the economy.