Pro-Putin leaders win two elections in Europe, reminding the Kremlin it has friends in high places

 

Hungary's Viktor Orban is seen as Vladimir Putin's closest ally in the European Union.

After weeks of failing to divide Europe over his war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin enjoyed two small diplomatic victories this weekend.

In both Hungary and Serbia, ukopenly pro-Russian parties comfortably won legislative elections, providing Putin with a welcome reminder that despite the international community's firm and largely united response to the invasion, he does have some friends to his west.

The most significant victory came in the form of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his nationalist Fidesz party winning a landslide. Hungary is a member of both the European Union and NATO, meaning Putin can claim to have a friend with seats at the top table of two of his most-hated institutions.

On Sunday night, during his victory speech, Orban goaded not only the EU but Ukraine.

"We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it's sure that it can be seen from Brussels," he said, adding that Fidesz "will remember this victory until the end of our lives because we had to fight against a huge amount of opponents." Included in that list of opponents were Brussels bureaucrats, international media and, pointedly, Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky has directly criticized Orban for failing to support Ukraine as enthusiastically as many of his European counterparts have over the past weeks.

Putin was quick to congratulate Orban on his win. But few believe it will amount to much more than a symbolic victory and do little to affect the EU's resolve on Ukraine.

The reality is, Orban was expected to win and the EU has been working around his leadership for years. Despite dragging his feet early on, Orban has gone along with EU sanctions against Russia and has largely been in line with the rest of the Western alliance. Hungary's main block in terms of supporting Ukraine has been Orban's reluctance to let weapons flow through his country to support Ukrainian troops.

Hungary is also the major holdout in EU talks about banning imports of energy from Russia. Germany said over the weekend that the bloc needed to discuss a ban on Russian gas after reports of war crimes carried out in Ukraine -- a move that Orban has repeatedly ruled out.

Hungary's obstinance has annoyed its key ally Poland, Europe's other major rule of law offender, which has used its veto powers to protect Orban from EU punishments numerous times in recent years. Whether Poland will do so after the war is over is unclear.

Orban sits next to Putin during the World Judo Championships in Budapest on August 28, 2017.

 

Hungary has drifted a long way from the EU's values on rule of law and human rights, clamping down on cultural institutions and suppressing press freedom.

Most attempts to punish Hungary at an EU level have failed, not least because meaningful action would require all EU member states to agree in a vote.

Poland and Hungary have lately had a pact of sorts, effectively both wielding their EU vetoes to protect the other. However, Poland is arguably the biggest anti-Russia hawk in the EU and it's so far unclear how this will affect the Poland-Hungary axis once the war is over.

And since the start of the war, EU officials have quietly been talking about offering Poland carrots to pull closer to the rest of the bloc, rather than treating Poland and Hungary as two delinquents.

Serbia's Aleksandar Vucic, pictured after his victory on Sunday, has been placed in a difficult position by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

 

The situation is very different in Serbia in that it isn't a member of the EU or NATO. It is currently going through the process of joining the EU, with negotiations expected to end in the next couple of years.

Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vučić, has been placed in a difficult position by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For years, he has tried to balance maintaining strong diplomatic and economic ties to Russia (and a particular fondness for Putin) with the Western embrace that would come with full EU membership.

During the election campaign, Vučić didn't deviate from this balance and ran on a platform of peace and stability in the region, Reuters reported.

Serbia is almost entirely dependent on Russian gas, while its army maintains ties with Russia's military. Although Serbia backed two United Nations resolutions condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it refused to impose sanctions against Moscow, Reuters reported.

The Kremlin also supports Belgrade's opposition to the independence of Kosovo by blocking its membership to the United Nations.

There's little doubt that the weekend's election results -- particularly in Hungary -- will have caused Putin to smile and leaders in Brussels to hold their heads in their hands. For the EU, though, more Orban really means more of the same. He might provide Putin with some propaganda wins and he might put the brakes on wider EU plans in the future. But the EU has been working on ways to work around Orban for years and knows that when push comes to shove, Orban is happier inside the club causing trouble than plotting to leave.

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Europe's populists are rushing to distance themselves from Vladimir Putin

 

This is what two weeks of war in Ukraine looked like

Russian President Vladimir Putin has for years enjoyed life as an influential political figure in many European Union member states.

Even in countries that have taken a staunch anti-Kremlin line since Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin has sought opportunities to attach himself to populist political movements that promote an anti-West agenda and undermine confidence in mainstream European politics. 

Putin has repeatedly associated himself with prominent Euroskeptic opposition figures, like France's Marine Le Pen, Italy's Matteo Salvini, the Netherland's Geert Wilders and, perhaps most damagingly for the EU, Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary. 

Whether that support is via symbolic visits to and from Moscow or through direct funding, rowdy populists who talk down the threat of Russia have played a role in Putin's goal of dividing Europe -- and preventing it from taking meaningful action against a belligerent Russia. 

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has led to many of those who'd previously cozied up to Putin now looking to distance themselves from the Kremlin. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) speaks with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (R) during their meeting in Moscow on February 1, 2022.

 

Earlier this week, the far-right Italian politician Salvini, a long-standing staunch opponent of mass migration, visited Przemysl, a town in Poland that shares a border with Ukraine, supposedly to show his support for Ukraine, Poland and the refugees forced to flee their homes.

When he arrived, Przemysl's mayor told Salvini to "see what his friend Putin has done," while brandishing a T-shirt with the Russian President's face on it. In 2014, Salvini was seen wearing an identical T-shirt while visiting Moscow. 

Meanwhile, French Presidential candidate Le Pen has had to walk a tightrope, defending her previous ties to Putin, which involved financial support from Russian banks. Her party has defended its association with Putin historically, but Le Pen herself was made to admit that he ran an "authoritarian regime" and that the invasion of Ukraine is a "clear violation straight of international law and absolutely indefensible." 

The Russian invasion has forced Hungary's Orban to "condemn Russia's armed offensive" and allow NATO troops and weapons to pass through Hungary, although he has tried to mitigate blowback from Russia by preventing arms directly traveling from Hungary into Ukraine. 

Putin's aggressive behavior is, of course, nothing new. All of these political figures saw what Russia did in 2014 and still maintained relations with the Kremlin. What were they gaining from befriending an autocrat? 

The mayor of Przemysl holds up a T-shirt with the likeness of Vladimir Putin as Matteo Salvini speaks with journalists on March 8, 2022.

 

The answer to that is more complicated than a simple financial transaction. Of course, in the case of Le Pen's loans from Russian banks and Orban's funding for a nuclear power station, Russia presented an investment opportunity that both would have struggled to find elsewhere. 

Katalin Cseh, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament, explains that in recent years, European money has come with strings attached -- like obeying the EU's rules on human rights and freedom of expression. 

"There is a very clear financial benefit in dealing with Putin, especially at the time European money comes with questions about freedoms of media, human rights and corruption, which Putin doesn't care about," she told CNN. 

However, it's more than just money that many of these fringe groups see in Putin. He also represents a type of political leadership that stands in direct contrast to what many conservative Europeans see as Brussels' liberal agenda -- one they say promotes inclusivity that threatens the Europe of traditional, Judeo-Christian values. 

Andrius Kubilius, the former Prime Minister of Lithuania and current Member of the European Parliament, told CNN that Putin's goal, in this sense, was always transparent. 

"Putin's strategy was to find people within the European Union who would support some of his more radical domestic political and social ideas. He understood very well this is how you divide us politically, splitting the European Council and Parliament so we could not take strong, unified positions against him," Kubilius said. 

Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini (R) embraces Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of a meeting in Milan on August 28, 2018.

 

Those political and social ideas include things like anti-LGBT laws, undermining the independent judiciary and clamping down on the free press. 

"Many of the liberal groups in the European Parliament have a hatred of the type of traditional conservatism they see in Russia," said Gunnar Beck, an MEP for the German right populist party, Alternative fur Deutschland. 

Speaking of his party and their partners within the European Parliament, Beck told CNN that "many of us are opposed to the fashionable social trends of our time, some of which are promoted through with public money. We look at Russia and see a European country where these issues have not gone too far, as we see it." 

While Beck said that Putin's invasion is a "clear breach of international law," he and others like him still feel that the West's anger at Russia's behavior is at times "deeply hypocritical," and view Putin as an example of a leader defending his country's "heritage and values." 

In this sense, the kind words that flow from Europe's populists to Moscow and vice versa feed a particular political narrative that is convenient for all sides. 

For those Euroskeptic Europeans, Putin's Russia is a country that doesn't tolerate things they believe erode the social and moral fiber of the country, like LGBT rights and mass immigration. They don't see any cognitive dissonance in condemning Putin's war while also applauding his resistance to liberal, modern values. 

For Putin, these European cheerleaders present an opportunity to sow disunity in both the EU and the Western alliance more broadly.

"Putin's tool was to sow uncertainty in Europe, promoting a set of values very different from ours. For years, the Kremlin has used disinformation to exploit people and maximize divisions in society," President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola told CNN. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Marine Le Pen at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 24, 2017.

 

However, she believes that "the war has changed everything" in ways that will last "probably for a very long time."

"He has underestimated Europe's resolve and the importance that Europeans give to freedom and democracy, just as he has underestimated the resilience and the resistance of the Ukrainian people," Metsola said. 

It is likely that Putin's actions have made him such a pariah that Europe's security map has been changed forever. Senior European and NATO diplomats have previously told CNN that the Ukraine invasion has advanced thinking around security by light years. Historically, it has been very hard to get EU agreement on any foreign policy issue; now they are signing off sanctions packages and upping defense spending at a rate unthinkable just weeks ago. 

Putin's merciless violence will also affect the domestic politics of those who'd previously stood beside him. 

It is likely that Le Pen will be reluctant to play up her ties to the Russian President ahead of the French election in April. Cseh notes that Hungary's election, also in April, will force Orban to walk the tightrope of his traditional voters, whom, Cseh says, he has told for years that "the EU is the enemy and Putin is a great guy."

Putin's invasion has already cost him dearly, in terms of his complicated, but ultimately beneficial relationship with the rest of Europe.

And as the war rumbles on, it is likely that on top of the economic pain and personnel losses, he will live the rest of his life as a persona non grata with some of the individuals who helped him grow his -- and Russia's -- wealth and status as a global player the rest of the world was willing to work with. 

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Why Putin will regret launching this war

 

Has Vladimir Putin's assault on Ukraine outrun the resources he's committed to it? That's the view of retired US Army Major General Mike Repass, who has an informed vantage point on the conflict, having worked in the Ukrainian security sector since 2016. The former commander of the US Special Operations Command in Europe, Repass provides education and advisory support to the Ukrainian military on a US government contract. 

 

Peter Bergen

In discussions Thursday and Friday, I spoke to Repass about why new leadership and the improved training of the Ukrainian military has markedly improved its performance in recent years, the kind of anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons the Ukrainians hope that the US and its NATO allies will supply them with and what he sees happening next as the war in Ukraine grinds on. He predicts a campaign by the Russians that could turn the cities of Ukraine into rubble, creating a refugee crisis that overwhelms bordering nations, and destabilizes Central and Eastern Europe.

But Repass believes that while the Russians may be able to overcome Ukraine's stiff defense, they will not be able to hold onto the country because Putin doesn't have sufficient forces in theater to occupy large swaths of Ukraine indefinitely. In short, Putin has bitten off more than he can chew.

Disclosure: Repass is on the advisory council of the Global Special Operations Foundation, where I am the chairman of the board. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.

Repass: The bottom line is the Ukrainian military forces have acquitted themselves exceptionally well thus far in the war. Russia will have a very difficult time subduing them because they are willing to fight until it becomes seemingly "futile," or they no longer have the resources to do so.

The Ukrainians have been overmatched by Russian technology and outmanned and outgunned -- by Russian tanks, artillery, precision long range strike missiles, armored personnel carriers -- but the terrain favors the defenders, especially in the north and east of Ukraine, although less so in the south.

I think time and mass are on the Russian side, and they're going to be able to either create conditions for peace suitable to Putin's liking, or they will outright destroy the cities of Ukraine and the Ukrainian military with it, which to me still leaves a resistance scenario for the Ukrainians. So, there are multiple plausible futures.

Bergen: Why are the Ukrainians fighting better than many had expected?

Repass: I'm not surprised at how well the Ukraine army is fighting. I am surprised at the lethargy of the Russian assault; it seems to be slow and plodding up north. In the east, they're getting their butts handed to them. In the south, they seem to be making steady progress.

Putin expected the Ukrainians to capitulate like they did in 2014 when he took Crimea, but overall, NATO and the US have done a magnificent job in training the Ukrainian military and reforming it and building it into a viable national defense force since 2014. The difference between then and now is the leadership of Ukraine is set on unifying with the West, politically, militarily, and economically.

On the military side, President Zelensky had inherited an old cadre of guys that he has replaced. The military leadership he brought in last year are all younger general officers, and they served together in the Donbas region in combat against the Russians. The leadership he has on the military side is much more engaged and much more influential.

Zelensky also brought in a new minister of defense. The previous minister was not up to the task for several reasons, so he brought in Oleksiy Reznikov, and he's been outstanding.

So, the new leadership has really picked up the pace of reforms they were on. Given another year or two, those guys would have been in a different place altogether, looking much more like a NATO country's armed forces.

I've visited 100, 150, 200 tactical units in various places -- in Afghanistan and Iraq, where I served two combat tours -- and I know instantly when I walk into a tactical unit environment, what the dynamic is there. When I visited a Ukrainian Special Forces unit in September, I sensed that immediately these guys were well-trained; they looked like our guys. They had the same mannerisms. They had the same planning processes.

Bergen: I thought Putin's attack on Ukraine would be like the US military seizing Baghdad in 2003 and that the Russians would decapitate the Ukrainian regime quickly.

Repass: I think that's what the world expected. So, strategically, the NATO mindset was, "Hey, we're not going to get involved because by the time we commit to this thing, we get cranked up and get engaged, the damn thing is going to be over. So we're not going to risk the political capital with another nuclear power to do this." Yet now, we have another geostrategic reality in that the Ukrainian defense is pretty doggone viable. I think Ukrainians are in the vanguard of protecting the liberal democracies of Europe.

Bergen: For the Ukrainians, what weapons are needed now from NATO and the US? Or is it at the point where it's too late to get weapons in because of logistical issues?

Repass: No, it's not too late. Every Ukrainian tactical commander is asking for air defense and anti-tank weapons. They want air defense weaponry like Stingers or SA-7s, and they want anti-tank weapons. They know where the enemy is. They know how to get to him, but they don't have the means in the field.

There's congestion in the NATO weapons delivery pipeline because the spigot was only turned on days ago, and they haven't reached the Ukrainian tactical units yet.

I'm not speaking for NATO in any way, shape, or form when I say what I'm about to say, but one of the things is that they must have a common communication system. Right now, there are dissimilar and cumbersome communications between the Ukrainian commands and the nations that are providing support.

The second thing is because it isn't a NATO operation, NATO hasn't responded in a formalized way to stand up movement coordination centers and logistic control centers. So there's a lot of improvisation going on with the coalition of the willing and able, putting together the transportation networks and the logistics networks. There's a lot of work that can be done among and between the individual NATO member states to shore up efficiency and effectiveness and speed up the delivery of the lethal weaponry.

Bergen: Why is a 40-mile Russian convoy on the road trying to take Kyiv? It seems a strange approach.

Repass: Yes. Everybody is scratching their head about that. There are a couple things that I think feed into this. So, it's 40 miles long now, but the convoy started out in segments. And those segments were somewhere between 50 and a couple hundred vehicles at a time. The idea was for these segments to deploy, but then the congestion started happening due to combat fatalities and breakdowns.

Also, if the vehicles and tanks get off that road, then they're in a quagmire. There's mud in the region that persists for basically the springtime, running from now for another six weeks or so.

So, cross-country mobility is exceedingly inhibited in the northern part of the country. The southern part of the country, you don't have that problem. So you don't see these massive convoys down south. You only see it up north where getting off the road is a problem.

Bergen: Why was this so poorly planned, or was it just that it was likely to not go well because of the weather circumstances we're seeing?

Repass: We assume the Russians are capable of efficient planning, but they're also capable of bad planning. They haven't done this level of planning and execution in any of their training exercises. So, they're somewhat unfamiliar with the large maneuver and sustainment aspects of what they're attempting to do.

Bergen: What's next?

Repass: A Russian campaign to turn the cities into rubble, creating a refugee crisis, overwhelming the borders and the border nations, and destabilizing Central and Eastern Europe.

They're going to target government infrastructure and then means of command and control -- public communications, internet, radio towers, cell phone towers -- anything they can do to disrupt communications, so they separate the people from the government.

With this campaign, they want to create mass shock and panic in the society to create complex challenges for the government and degrade the will of the people. Already about a million refugees have crossed the borders out of a population of around 41 million. That's going to go up significantly. You're going to have several million people streaming to the west.

Belarus and Russia will likely declare martial law, and they'll be able to clamp down on all manner of public discourse, media, internet, and cut down any potential for resistance or coup attempts internal to their countries.

They likely will combine forces, move to seal off the western border of Ukraine, first, to create a greater humanitarian disaster in Ukraine; and second, to cut off any resupply coming in from the West.

I think at that point in time, the Ukraine military, will continue to fight primarily west of the Dnieper River. In other places, particularly in the Ukrainian urban centers, you're going to have an insurgency. A resistance will rise up either pre-planned or organically, and they will inflict pain and destruction on the Russians to the extent that they can.

This is where the term "indigestible" comes into play. The Russians may be able to consume Ukraine, but they cannot digest it. It will be too painful to hold onto it, and eventually they will have to spit it back out. In essence, the cost of occupation is too great compared to the returns.

The Russians may eventually control the urban areas, but there are vast areas between them -- 50 kilometers, 80 kilometers apart -- where there's nothing. There are many small villages and small towns that are not controlled by Russians.

The devastation is going to horrify Europe and North America. The non-intervention argument will eventually be overridden by the human suffering problem. And then, potentially a coalition of the willing might impose something along the lines of a no-fly zone or safe havens for refugees and citizens of the major metropolitan areas.

Bergen: So those safe havens could look a little like the kind of safe haven that the US established in Kurdistan in Iraq in 1991?

Repass: Yes, something like that, in western Ukraine.

Bergen: What is the minimum that Putin wants to achieve in Ukraine?

Repass: The one critical thing that Putin must have is control of the North Crimea Canal.

Bergen: Why is that?

Repass: Because when he invaded Crimea and Donbas in 2014, the Ukrainians shut off the North Crimea Canal source at the Dnieper River. So, it dried up, and they've been relying on groundwater in Crimea since, and then the groundwater has all dried up. So, Putin has had no fresh water in Crimea until now.

The Russians captured the North Crimea Canal and fresh water just showed up in Crimea in the last day or so. So that's the one thing he had to have.

What he also wanted to have is a land bridge from Donbas over to Crimea and to secure that land route and the North Crimea Canal source at the Dnieper River. He would essentially have control of all territory east of the Dnieper River, going up to Kyiv and then arcing north and eastward to Donbas. If Putin seizes enough land east of the Dnieper River, then he's willing to bargain everything else away.

But even with the geographic territory that I just described, Putin's circa 175,000 troops which are presently deployed in and around Ukraine are not enough to maintain control of that geography.

Bergen: How much manpower would Putin need to control the territory?

Repass: Difficult to say.

The Russians must have enough people to coerce the 41 million people in Ukraine to cooperate with the Russian government. It took a large part of the German Army's Eastern Front to subdue the Ukrainians so they could pursue the campaign into southern Russia during World War II.

So, I don't see how Putin's going to be able to pull that off.

I think the Western liberal democracies have both a moral obligation and a political imperative to support a nation fighting for its independence and the pursuit of a liberal political order in the Western tradition. If not here, where will we take a stand against autocratic and revisionist forces? What should Georgia and Azerbaijan conclude from our timidity in the face of evil? Surely Taiwan is next.

I believe Russia's assault on Ukraine is the leading edge of militarily strong states preying upon weaker ones. Few of us thought we would be here, but so it is. What are we going to do now?

History has been unkind to nations when they tolerate or appease such aggression. The concepts of territorial integrity and democracy cannot end at NATO's borders. Is the rest of the world to be left to the wolves while there is but one island of security? Russia's attack on Ukraine cannot succeed if we hope to build and sustain the benefits of democracy beyond NATO's borders.

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