Orban believes the West should stop trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine and instead broker a fair and workable peace deal. Ukraine “will never win a war against Russia” even with Western help “because the Russian military has asymmetric dominance” on the battlefield. “A new strategy is needed, the focus of which should not be on winning the war, but on peace negotiations.” This open negativity about Ukraine’s chances from a European leader is surprising, but Ukrainian interests were not foremost in Orban’s mind during his speech. Having won a landslide election victory in April on his promise to protect Hungarians from the effects of war, Orbán weaved the economic and cultural realities facing his country into a convincing argument for peace from a Hungarian perspective. Hungary, he said, is a “transit economy”. Like other Central European countries, its economic model is based on production for world markets, generated by foreign investment. Therefore, its prosperity depends on the lack of international barriers. The appearance of a new “iron curtain” would be disastrous, turning Hungary from a “meeting place combining the advantages of East and West” into “the edge of something – a periphery”. The importance of globalization to Hungary’s economic well-being is ironic given Orbán’s notoriously hardline stance on immigration and multiculturalism. But the attitudes of Central Europe on such matters also help to reinforce ambivalence about the war. Many people outside the region’s cosmopolitan capitals see government responses to Russia’s invasion as confirmation that they have become enclaves of a Western hegemony that pushes values they don’t necessarily share. Orbán, meanwhile, supported his economic arguments with a pacifist moral dimension. “The primary aspect of any war is that mothers will mourn their children and children will lose their parents,” he said. It helps that this peaceful impulse coincides with Hungary’s political and economic interests – assuming, as Orbán insists, that Putin doesn’t have plans for Central Europe as well, if he doesn’t stop at Ukraine. Orbán pointed out alleged flaws in the West’s Manichean view of war, describing how most of the world – “the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, the South Africans, the Arab world, Africa” – are “provably” on its side. West. While that doesn’t necessarily mean they support Russian aggression, they just don’t see the war in the same way: as a titanic struggle between good and evil that overshadows “their own problems, which they struggle with and which they want to solve ». Again, Orbán’s rejection of moral absolutes is not unusual in Central Europe. While a sense of moral certainty about the war is shared by most governments – with the exception of Hungary – and the media, it does not extend to the general public, which remains deeply divided. Surveys consistently show concern about the level of support given to Ukraine’s war effort and refugees, a situation not helped by a crippling distrust of mainstream media reporting. More than a third of Slovaks, for example, believe that Russia’s invasion was deliberately provoked by the West. However, recognizing that others do not share the West’s view does not necessarily make the West wrong. Allowing Russia’s brutal violation of Ukrainian sovereignty to go unpunished for the sake of greater global prosperity would run counter to the principles of justice and freedom on which the Western way of life is based – a way of life that Orbán fought for and others in Central and Eastern Europe hard under twentieth-century communist rule. And while pacifist arguments—even self-interested ones—are compelling, to set aside a sense of moral justice in war would leave us with a world in which might is right, and in which Hungary would face far more pernicious influences than the Western hegemony of which it is now an uncomfortable part. Orbán’s desire to end the fighting and restore economic balance is understandable – but such an achievement would ultimately harm the national interests he is so keen to protect.
