Et tu Viktor?

Viktor Orban would do anything to advance the cause of reactionary authoritarianism worldwide, but he won’t do that:

Hungary will support all European Union sanctions against Russia and will not block anything, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Saturday, speaking on the Ukrainian-Hungarian border.

“Hungary made clear that we support all the sanctions, so we will block nothing, so what the prime ministers of the European Union are able to agree, we accept it and we support it,” he told reporters in English.

“This is the time to be united, it’s a war,” he said, adding that peace efforts were the most important.

One thing that’s happening here is that Putin seems to be a classic willful victim of reactionary epistemic closure — he seems to have no idea how strong the opposition to his imperialist aggression would be. It’s particularly remarkable that in his unhinged pre-war rant he couldn’t even be bothered to line up his justifications with the propaganda being put out by his stooges in the western media, ignoring NATO expansion almost entirely. Instead, he focused on a nakedly imperialist candid reason (putting the USSR back together) that is in nobody else’s interest, and a lie so obvious (Vladimir Putin’s anti-Nazi crusade!) that anyone .1% more skeptical about Putin than, say, Glenn Greenwald would immediately respond to with peals of laughter.

I don’t know how this will come out, and a lot of very horrible outcomes remain on the table, but the collective resistance to this unjust war has been remarkable.

This really is remarkable. NATO countries are pouring weapons into Ukraine with the specific intent of killing Russian soldiers. Russia doesn’t seem prepared to do anything about it. https://t.co/m50sEYVKWm— Robert Farley (@drfarls) February 26, 2022