First assessments of the year one of the war in Ukraine
February 25th, 2023One year after Russia invaded Ukraine, commentators agree on one thing – that this first anniversary will not be the last.
On Mandiner, Gellért Rajcsányi writes that Russia lost the war at the very moment it was launched. Russia, he explains, intended to annex Ukraine, uniting ‘the brotherly’ Ukrainian people with its own. Instead, it has ‘bombed Ukrainians into a hostile nation’. Now Russia is on a path to becoming a totalitarian dictatorship, while Ukraine is up for even more destruction, while it dreams of reconstruction with Western aid, sometime in the distant future, Rajcsányi concludes.
On hvg.hu, international security expert István Gyarmati deems it necessary for the West to keep supporting Ukraine and perhaps even step up weapons deliveries. Meanwhile, he warns against pushing Russia into a corner, and cautions that the prospect of negotiations must be kept open. Gyarmati also believes Ukraine should radically revise its policies towards national minorities, including ethnic Hungarians. He deems such steps vital if Ukraine is to prove itself up to European standards but also to ‘pacify’ its millions of ethnic Russians.