Did Viktor Orban achieve anything during his mission to Mar-al-Lago this past week?
We have all seen video images of Viktor Orban’s visit with Donald Trump on Monday, 9 December, which featured the two leaders smiling broadly and showing thumbs up to photo journalists. We know that during the same visit, Orban met with Elon Musk: and major media showed them in a friendly conversation during which Musk was carrying one of his children on his shoulders. These were all heart-warming images to Trump supporters, awful signs for dyed-in-the-wool Democrats of the prospective collaboration between what they believe to be hard right authoritarian leaders during the Trump years to come. Some reporting also carried mention of Trump’s designated national security adviser Mike Waltz as having been present for the talks.
On Wednesday, 11 December, Reuters and other U.S. media reported briefly that Orban had a one-hour telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin during which he evidently recounted what he learned in Mar-al-Lago and sought Putin’s agreement for a Christmas Day cease-fire and large-scale exchange of prisoners to be arranged with Kiev. We may assume that Putin gave his consent, but subsequently Vladimir Zelensky rejected Orban’s initiatives on both matters and roundly attacked the Hungarian Prime Minister for speaking to Putin at all. Some of our media did quote Orban as saying that this week was the most critical in the entire Ukraine war, meaning that the fate of the world was hanging in the balance.
On this same Wednesday, we learned that Kiev had used six ATACMS missiles in a strike against the military airfield in Taganrog, a Russian port city on the Sea of Azov.
The week closed with Russia’s massive missile and drone attack Friday, 13 December, on Ukraine’s already shattered electricity generating infrastructure, which even compelled Kiev to shut down the nuclear plants which till now had been the mainstay of residual electricity supply to the country. One half of Ukraine was now said to be totally without electricity. Nearly 100 Russian hypersonic short range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles together with a still greater number of killer drones were deployed in what Moscow called a successful mission in retaliation for Kiev’s ATACMS strike on Taganrog.
All of these reports in major Western media leave us with a great many loose ends. The interrelationship of these various developments and in particular, the impact of Viktor Orban’s peace mission to the United States, is left unanswered.
With the help of insights that I have just gathered from the remarks of panelists on the Russian talk show Vremya pokazhet (Time will Tell), I will try to tie up the loose ends and will argue that we all owe a great ‘thank you’ to Orban for his brave defiance of colleagues in the European Union, for using these closing weeks of his six-month presidency of the European Council to save us all from escalation towards nuclear catastrophe, at the upper end of ambition, and to save the lives of Russian and Ukrainian servicemen on the holiest day in the Christian calendar, at the lower end of ambition.
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Readers of these pages are aware that I have been drawing most of my material on what the Kremlin is thinking from the two leading news and analysis shows on Russian state television for their home audience, Evening with Vladimir Solovyov and The Great Game hosted by Vyacheslav Nikonov. Occasionally I have also made reference to Sixty Minutes, led by Yevgeny Popov and his wife Olga Skabeyeva. The presenters of these programs may be described as highly authoritative, and I have a personal reading on them all going back to my meetings with them on air back in 2016-2017 when I had a year-long ‘day in the sun’ on Russian domestic television as a guest panelist.
At that time, they had a special interest in hearing from Russia-neutral or Russia-friendly Americans who were fluent in Russian, as opposed to their traditional fare of Russia-hating Americans fluent in Russian, of whom the most celebrated example was a certain Michael Bohm. The reason for this was clear: the Russian news editors were in a state of confusion over what the Trump presidency meant for bilateral relations and there was a hope that an improvement was coming. Of course, those hopes were dashed during 2017 and by mid-way through that year Russian talk shows reverted to inviting devil-incarnate Americans panelists whom they could beat into the ground during their shows for the amusement of their audiences. In the past two years of the Special Military Operation, relations have deteriorated so far that no foreigners of any stripe are invited onto the talk shows other than an occasional Belarus diplomat or Opposition personality from Ukraine.
What I have not been using to inform my journalism in recent months is one other important talk show on which I appeared back in 2016, the aforementioned Vremya pokazhet. It also has high ratings, though is a notch below the Solovyov, Nikonov and Popov programs. Back in 2016, it distinguished itself by scheduling shows in the mid-afternoon when the audience would consist heavily of housewives and pensioners, as opposed to prime time with its primarily working male audience. I am unsure how they position themselves in this regard today, but watching the first segment of their 12 December show, I see that they are using some of the same expert panelists as the other talk shows but are bringing a distinctive focus to the discussions that helped me to reconsider the week’s news in the way I do below.
For the Russian speakers among you, here is the link: https://rutube.ru/video/0244c2bc77020e60adde6af875ca6d22/
What I piece together from the material presented on this show is the certainty that Orban’s mission to Mar-al-Lago and his subsequent debriefing for Putin had a strong influence on the way that the Kremlin chose to retaliate for the attack on Taganrog. Clearly, as I have said in my interviews this past week, there were options on the table that were sharply escalatory, foremost among them the possibility of an attack using the Oreshkin hypersonic missile against the US missile base in Poland that was the source of great concern and loud complaints by Moscow going back seven years or more when its construction was first announced. Now, from the words of one panelist on this show, it becomes evident that another possibility which the Kremlin was considering was an Oreshkin strike on a decision-making center in Kiev, but one which no one appears to have considered from among my peers in the alternative media: namely a strike on the U.K. embassy in Kiev, which the Russians properly consider to be directing the war that Ukraine is waging. And the Russians have in hand Western precedents, starting with the U.S. ‘accidental’ bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May, 1999 during the NATO offensive to bring down the Milosevic government.
It is clear to me that Orban was able to provide Putin with persuasive evidence from his talks with Trump, Musk and Waltz that it would be far better to show restraint, not to take the bait from the Biden administration to escalate and thereby not upset Trump’s likely plans to stop funding the war upon taking office. Accordingly, the Russians only ravaged what remains of Ukraine’s power supply and did not touch NATO assets inside or outside Ukraine.
For this, as I say, we all owe a great debt of gratitude to the Hungarian prime minister.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024