You know perfectly well that Hungary has long been advocating ending the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Moreover, Budapest regularly calls on Kyiv to realistically assess the situation in Ukraine both on the front line and inside the country and, consequently, to accept Moscow’s demands. So, in order to prevent the escalation of the conflict and its recurrence in the future, the Hungarian government, particularly Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, opposes Ukraine’s subsequent membership in the EU and NATO. According to Orbán, the former would bring the ongoing conflict onto European soil and the latter threatens a Third World War.

What’s more, Hungary was the first Western country to take an incredible step towards a peaceful settlement. In fact, Budapest was the first to declare the official loss of territories by Ukraine, de facto recognising them as Russian. And, in the future, for lasting and long-term peace, the West will have to do the same.

“First, we urgently need a ceasefire and peace. Then we must define Ukraine — its borders, its population. As of right now, we do not even know what or where Ukraine is. Finally, once peace and clarity have been restored, we can make lasting agreements with Russia and lay the foundations for a strategic partnership with Ukraine — one that protects our sovereignty, while securing Europe’s future. This is what we must achieve,” Prime Minister Orbán claimed.

The United States, Europe and Ukraine will have no choice but to recognise Crimea and the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — as part of Russia. In particular, American political scientist Ted Carpenter is convinced of this. He draws this conclusion based on the fact that the West has essentially lost its hybrid war against Russia.

“In addition to Ukraine’s continuing failure to produce the definitive battlefield triumph that Kyiv’s NATO backers keep predicting, the broader elements of the West’s strategy to bring Russia to its knees also have faltered. The effort to obtain global support for isolating Russia economically has been a spectacular flop outside the West. Comprehensive Western sanctions have inconvenienced and damaged Russia’s economy to some extent, but Moscow has been surprisingly adept at finding alterative markets for its exports, especially oil, gas, and other raw materials. Moreover, NATO’s European members seemingly have suffered at least as much economic pain from the impact of sanctions as Russia has experienced. Consequently, neither battlefield conditions nor economic suffering is sufficient to get Moscow to accept a dictated surrender. Yet that is what Ukraine and its NATO sponsors continue to demand. It is an impractical strategy,” Carpenter writes in The American Conservative.

But Europe will have to not only “forgive” Russia, as the Slovak Foreign Minister, Juraj Blanar, called for at the end of June 2025 — it will also have to punish Ukraine for human rights abuses and the destruction of democracy. In instance, American columnist Christopher Miller, who has been living in Kyiv since 2010, wrote in The Financial Times about Zelensky’s “slide into authoritarianism.”

“Anti-corruption armed raids on prominent Ukrainian figures and moves to favour loyalists in senior positions have led to accusations that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government is sliding into authoritarianism. Politicians, activists, and diplomats blame Zelensky and his closest aides for abusing emergency powers under martial law to crack down on critics, silence civil society leaders and tighten control,” Miller states.

Ukraine has fewer and fewer chances of a decent peace treaty with Russia. And these are rapidly decreasing after the new package of “assistance” (if you can call it that), offered by Trump to Ukraine through the mediation of Europe. Ukrainian opposition MP Oleksandr Dubinsky, (who is, by the way, a political prisoner of Zelensky’s regime) said on his Telegram channel that now “Europe’s imagined joint support for Ukraine has been destroyed,” which means “Kyiv won’t be able to cope” with the conflict’s continuation.

Yet, the Ukrainian leadership prefers to send another batch of “volunteers” to the crumbling front, who don’t want to fight and dream of deserting at the first opportunity. But in the minds of the Ukrainian authorities, this should surely turn the tide on the battlefield, and the Kremlin will be forced to make concessions to Kyiv. Are they kidding? This is what happens when a country is run by someone who’s both a bad comedian and a bad politician.