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Hungary said last week that the only way that Europe can avoid a recession is if there is an immediate ceasefire announced in Ukraine and warned that Europeans will grow weary of a war that is unfolding “far away.”
Balázs Orbán, the political director for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (no relation), told the Financial Times that the EU should move towards “rationality” and, instead of backing the Ukrainian military, call for a peaceful settlement.
“They see that they can beat Putin, they can occupy the Kremlin and that’s their goal,” he told the paper. “At the beginning of the conflict, at least in the media, that was the mainstream opinion. But I would make a bet with you [on] how it will look in four months’ time… more rationality will come up.”
He told the paper that the middle class will begin to suffer in Europe and that will lead to new pressure for politicians.
“In Portugal or in Spain, people will not accept the fact that they are at war because they are far away…So it will cause political tension for sure,” he said.
His comments are in lockstep with his boss, the prime minister, who said that he is opposed to additional sanctions imposed against Russia and that the world should look to peace.
“We say yes to peace and no to more sanctions,” the prime minister said, according to Prensa Latina. He made the comments at the European Union summit in Brussels.
GLOBSEC institute conducted a recent opinion poll in Central and Eastern Europe that found only 48 percent of Hungarians blamed Russia for the Ukraine invasion.
There’s an ongoing debate in the EU about how long a united front against Russia could last when the fall and winter roll around and these countries are forced to function without Russian gas.
Markus Krebber, the head of German utility RWE, told the paper in an interview that there could be “chaos” when these gas supplies are turned off.
“The real fear I have is that European solidarity will come under significant stress if we don’t sort it out before the situation happens,” he said.
Citing multiple sources familiar with the situation, CNN reported that U.S. officials have been meeting with their British and European allies to discuss a negotiated settlement. The report said the framework would include Ukraine committing to neutrality vis-à-vis NATO and “negotiations between Ukraine and Russia on the future of Crimea and the Donbas region.”
We have pointed out that Ukrainian officials have said they would be unwilling to give up one inch of their country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week that Russia now occupies about 20 percent of the country.
TREND FORECAST: Russia took control of the key city of Severodonetsk in the eastern Donbas region which was Ukraine’s last stronghold in the region. Forces have been clashing in this city for months, which led to much of the city’s destruction according to the Ukraine military.
Rather than admitting complete defeat, the Western media instead trumped-up what the Ukraine government called “tactical withdrawal.” Again, with Russia now controlling some 20 percent of Ukraine, as we had forecast before the war began on 24 February, Ukraine would be in a better position to have negotiated for peace before the war escalated since they would not defeat Russia and billions of dollars would not be wasted in to bloody the killing fields and cities would not be destroyed.
TRENDPOST: The Western media has been one-sided in its coverage of the war and did its best to frame the early stages of the war as though Ukraine would somehow emerge victorious through their grit.
The Trends Journal has said that Kyiv will not win, and it would have been in the country’s best interest to negotiate early with Putin, when the Russian leader did not yet know for sure that the West would not join the fight. U.S. President Joe Biden ruined that possibility when he announced weeks before the invasion that U.S. forces would not save Ukraine. (See “ZELENSKY REJECTS PEACE PROPOSAL, SAYS UKRAINE WILL BEAT RUSSIA” and “UKRAINE CONFLICT HEATS UP: PUTIN RECOGNIZES DONETSK, LUHANSK AS INDEPENDENT FROM UKRAINE.”)
The harsh reality is that anyone who talks about concessions is immediately written off as a Putin sympathizer and, because of that, our suicidal politicians will continue to carry out their proxy war with Russia for as long as it take to… nobody seems to know.