LOS ANGELES.–Meeting with 46-year-old Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the first time since the Feb. 24, 2022 war with Russia, 61-year-old Hungarian President Viktor Orban asked Zelensky to accept 71-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin’s preliminary terms for a truce and ceasefire. Orban has been a vocal critic of the war believing that it undermines European Union [EU] security, leaves the Continent on a war footing, all because Ukraine won’t negotiate new security arrangements with Moscow. Zelensky, flush with U.S. and NATO cash-and-lethal weapons, continues to battle the Russian Federation with the expressed intent of ousting Russian forces from Ukrainian territory. Orban sees no end to the war, only more destruction, death and instability in Europe. Zelensky gets little real guidance from 81-year-old President Joe Biden and his national security team.
Orban has been demonized in the U.S. press much like Putin and former President Donald Trump. Trump said in the June 27 CNN debate that he would end the war in 24 hours, after he wins the 2024 presidential election, before he’s inaugurated. Trump would tell both Putin and Zelensky to go the peace table and work out a deal, regardless of Zelensky’s unrealistic demands and Putin’s insistence on taking more territory. Zelensky currently refuses to cede any territory to Russia, even though he’s lost some 20% of Ukraine’s sovereign territory to Moscow since the war began. Orban wants Zelensky to get real and stop the unnecessary violence that’s destroyed Ukraine’s infrastructure and bankrupted its economy. Zelensky is wholly dependent on U.S. government largess to pay his salary and those of his cronies and Kiev’s civil servants.
Making a sincere overture to Zelensky visiting Kiev yesterday, Orban pleaded with Zelensky to get real about the war. Biden and Zelensky have insisted that they’ll eventually destroy the Russian military and out Russian troops from Ukraine. Zelensky and Biden know the exact opposite has happened. Russian has grown stronger and more aggressive in the third year of the war, primarily because Moscow views the war as with the U.S. and NATO. “I asked the president whether it was possible to take a break, to stop the firing, and then continue the negotiations,” Orban told reporters in Kiev. “After all, a ceasefire could ensure speeding up the pace of these negotiations,” taking the opposite approach as Biden. Orban, who’s a trusted ally of Putin, knows that the Russian leader would give back at least some of the sovereign territory taken in the last two years.
Every foreign leader that offered a peace plan to Zelensky has been rejected as a Russian puppet, someone doing Putin’s bidding. Biden and Zelensky have been told by their generals that there is only a political solution to the Ukraine War. No matter how much fighting and destruction, the Kremlin won’t surrender to Ukraine, the U.S. or NATO. Putin sees the war as encroachment by the Western Alliance, arming Ukraine to teeth on the Russian border for the purpose of battling the Russian Federation. When Zelensky met in Lucerne, Switzerland June 14-16 for preliminary peace summit, Russian was not included in the discussions. Russia was excluded to give Zelensky time to process that the fact that peace talks must start sometime in the not-to-distant future. Orban is not an apologist for Putin, he genuinely wants peace for the benefit of all EU countries.
Orban is on the same page as 78-year-old former President Donald Trump, getting the warring parties to the peace table to stop the bloodshed and start the negotiating process requiring painful concessions on both sides. Zelensky acts like he’s the only party in the Ukraine War, making demands that Putin withdraw from the Crimean Peninsula and all other parts of Ukraine. Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union before it disbanded in 1991, creating Ukrainian independence. But Zelensky knows the history that Soviet Premier Nikta Khrushchev deed Crimea to Ukraine when it was a Soviet satellite. Zelensky knows there were consequences to the Feb. 22, 2014 Maiden Revolution when a CIA-backed coup toppled the Kremlin-backed Kiev government of Viktor Yanukovych. Poroshenko never offered Putin a 99-year lease in Crimea for his Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol.
Biden has failed to deliver the global coalition to back his proxy war in Ukraine, instead dividing the world into a destructive new Cold War, where Russia’s key trading partners feel inclined to continue their economic, military and strategic alliances with the Kremlin. Biden barely holds on to European backing for his proxy war in Ukraine. Officials like Orban reveal cracks in the European Union, seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine not perpetual war as Biden seeks. Signing a 10-year security pact with Ukraine June 13 further exposed cracks in Biden’s shaky European coalition. When Zelensky attends the NATO summit in Washington July 11, he’ll find little interest in Ukraine joining NATO anytime soon. NATO’s 32 members don’t want to join Zelensky’s war with the Kremlin. Zelensky has gaslighted too many in the EU about defending European democracy.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
