‘Because this process will be so difficult, the sad but unavoidable truth may be that if Ukraine takes part in the talks from the start, progress towards a settlement will become completely impossible,’ British journalist and author Anatol Lieven writes in his recent opinion piece published on Foreign Policy.
‘I believe that small countries have a big role to play in the current situation…In this kind of environment, I think that smaller countries that can maintain their neutrality are the ones that will win. But the ones that don’t have the willpower and the political autonomy to be neutral—the ones that are actually forced to take a stand—, well, I think, are going to lose the most.’
Donald Trump’s pick for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, stated in a recent interview that the President-elect’s team will take a hard look at Viktor Orbán’s Christmas ceasefire proposal. Last week the Hungarian prime minister concluded his second peace mission in six months, presenting a truce initiative and a large-scale prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine.
Lithuanian athlete Kornelija Dūdaitė was disqualified from the Super Worlds 2024 – Functional Fitness Championships in Budapest for wearing a shirt mocking Russia. Her case has reignited the debate over whether politics should have a place in the world of sports.
‘The Romanian Revolution teaches several lessons. First, an age-old truth: Freedom isn’t free. There is a lot of talk about how it was the cooperation of superpowers that made Central European democratization possible. But Romania is the main example that it would not have been enough that Gorbachev caved in to Reagan and Bush Sr. If the Romanian people had remained silent, there would have been no pressure of a critical magnitude to remove the dictator.’
‘Freedom, understood concretely, is a civilizational, not a natural, construct. This essentially conservative argument could provide the very basis for the continuation of a certain political tradition without which we, modern souls, would live in a much more cruel and inhumane world.’
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán proposed a Christmas ceasefire and a large-scale prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia as a conclusion to Hungary’s EU Presidency. However, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the proposal outright, stating: ‘There can be no discussions about the war that Russia wages against Ukraine without Ukraine.’
Subsequent to the anti-government rebels’ rapid advance that made President Bashar al-Assad depart from Syria, the Austrian government is planning to halt the processing of current Syrian asylum applications and to reassess previously granted asylum statuses. Additionally, family reunification programmes for Syrian refugees have been suspended.
‘The total EU debt-to-GDP ratio is nearing a staggering 90 per cent. EU citizens are being forced into collective debt against their will, with Hungarians then even denied access to funds. That is a ludicrous scenario. It’s like a bank forcing a person to take out a mortgage loan, then refusing to actually disburse the loan, but sending debt collectors to recover the repayments. This is where we stand in Europe today.’
The video report published on public media news website Hirado.hu takes viewers to Ungvár (Uzhhorod) and Szolyva (Svalyava) in Transcarpathia, a region in the Western part of Ukraine heavily populated by ethnic Hungarians, to showcase the everyday lives of locals living through the troubled, war-torn times in Ukraine.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.
