Even as the Russian offensive against the Ukrainian armed forces is in full swing, the Hungarian opposition and its allied media and NGOs are exploiting the crisis for their own political means.
Hungarian Katalin Cseh, MEP for the radical progressive student-party Momentum, has reposted an image of Hungarian Foreign Secretary Péter Szijjártó recently receiving a medal from his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, a useful distraction from the corruption investigation that her family business is currently facing.
Other European politicians on the left also see the Russian aggression against Ukraine as a carte blanche justification to attack their political foes, leeching on the (well-justified) empathy that is pouring towards Ukraine from all over the world. Donald Tusk, the boundlessly pro-Brussels leader of the Polish opposition, has himself remarked that “those EU governments which blocked tough decisions (i.e. Germany, Hungary, Italy) have disgraced themselves.”
He had to be reminded by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki that “Mr. Donald Tusk stood at the helm of Nord Stream 2; the European People’s Party led to the creation of that pipeline. Unfortunately, Tusk did nothing to prevent that. Donald Tusk leads the Nord Stream 2 party,” Morawiecki said and called for Tusk to resign as the president of the EPP.
Moreover, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó refuted Tusk’s claim that the three countries, including Hungary, would have blocked the exclusion of Russia from the global SWIFT exchange system. Szijjártó called this a flat out lie and confirmed that Hungary did not join the discussions in the above matter at all, and had voted for the entire package of sanctions instead. The minister called it regrettable that some politicians had been using the tragedy of war for political point-scoring.
All neighboring countries to Ukraine have shown extraordinary generosity towards refugees fleeing the fighting, chief among them Poland, which is said to be expecting as many as 4 million refugees from the war-torn country. However, it did not stop some media outlets from voicing their skepticism as to whether conservative government-run countries, which are so vehemently opposed to migrant quotas and opening their borders to mass migration, would be willing to take refugees from Ukraine. Drawing such parallels is cynical at best, but more crucially, it purposefully ignores the fact that Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary have all gone out of their way to help Ukrainians to reach safe haven.
Radio Free Europe Hungary chief among them, the broadcaster partly funded by George Soros’ OSF, began a particularly vicious media campaign with the help of another Soros organization, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. In this, they allege that the Hungarian government is spreading unsupported claims, according to which they intend to look after refugees, while in reality they could not accept more than 1,500.
In fact, according to government sources, over 1,600 refugees have entered the country in the first two days at the Záhony crossing with Ukraine. The vast majority of them have been transported on chartered buses towards airports, where chartered flights to other countries have been waiting for them, and some 80 were given shelter in the settlement of Záhony itself. The foreign secretary has also confirmed that all border crossings will stay open, even ones that have limited opening hours will function on a 24-hour basis.
It is no secret that housing hundreds of thousands of genuine refugees will strain services in all neighboring countries. In Poland, for instance, some have been forced to shelter in train station waiting rooms, while others in Hungary were housed in school gyms. But there remains an enormous goodwill from the population who are transporting these people in private cars into neighboring cities, and volunteering with churches and charities present at the borders.
It is disheartening that the left-wing press and political lobby groups masquerading as human rights groups are exploiting the misery of war for their narrow and self-serving political goals.
