What else Viktor Orban said, key points.
We are sitting in a car with all four wheels punctured. The sanctions have not shaken Moscow. It is clear that the West cannot win this conflict this way. Europe is in trouble - economically and politically; four governments have been victimised: the British, Bulgarian, Italian and Estonian governments. People will face steep price rises.
Most of the world has defiantly not supported us. China, India, Brazil, Africa, the Arab world are all aloof from this conflict, they are minding their own business.
The Western strategy was built on four premises: Ukraine could win with Anglo-Saxon instructors and NATO weapons, sanctions would weaken Russia and destabilise the Russian leadership, Europe could manage the economic consequences of sanctions and would suffer less than Russia, and the whole world would support the Western position. This strategy has failed. One never wins wars against the Russians.
Had Donald Trump been president of the US and Angela Merkel been chancellor of Germany at the crucial moment, this conflict would never have started.
When we talk about war, there is an important question: what to do? There will be no peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. Whoever is waiting for them is waiting in vain. Russia wants security guarantees, so only negotiations between Russia and the United States can end the war.
As long as there are no Russian-American negotiations, there will be no peace. We Europeans cannot be mediators in this because we missed our chance. We missed it when we had the Minsk agreements after Crimea in 2014 with guarantees from France and Germany, but unfortunately we failed to enforce them. And the Russians no longer want to negotiate with us.
We have to prepare for 2030, that is the most important horizon. By then the problems of the western world will have accumulated. There will be a very serious crisis in the United States. There will almost inevitably be an economic downturn in European countries, which may also cause political storms.
That is when we need to be in great shape: we need diplomatic, economic, intellectual and military strength.
We need to stay out of war, migration, gender madness, the global minimum tax and the pan-European recession. We managed to stay out of it in 2010 and 2020, we came out of each crisis stronger than when we went into it.
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