In his interview on The Tucker Carlson Network with Darryl Cooper, Carlson shared his perception of three major right-wing political figures he has interviewed, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin. He believes that as opposed to how the mainstream media likes to portray them, none of them are particularly radical, rather ‘sincere nationalists’ who ‘want to do the best for their countries’.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the prospects for a settlement in Ukraine and their countries’ bilateral relations in Moscow on Friday. The visit to Russia was the second stop of Orbán’s peace mission, following talks in Kyiv on Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin supports Beijing’s four-point peace plan for Ukraine, presented in April. However, peace seems further away than ever since the war’s outbreak, as Western leaders have adopted an increasingly aggressive stance ahead of the European elections.
Despite the increasingly hawkish rhetoric from President Emmanual Macron of France, the French Ambassador to Russia did attend President Vladimir Putin’s fifth inauguration. So did Ambassador Konkoly of Hungary, and the envoys of four other EU countries as well.
Viktor Orbán met the Georgian prime minister this week. He is expected to also attend a forum in China, where Vladimir Putin will also be present. This could be the first time the two meet since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
‘Christian nationalism is a type of religious nationalism in which the end goal is to achieve an absolute Christian theocracy within a society. Its advocates primarily focus on the internal politics of society, such as legislating civil and criminal laws that reflect their view of Christianity and the role of religion in political and social life, which calls for, at least in their mindset, a strongman like Putin.’
‘Let us not forget that while most of the world has rightly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, twenty years ago the United States invaded Iraq on false information that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not only possessed weapons of mass destruction, but that he had a direct link to and was harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists…The tragic results cost several thousand US soldiers’ lives.’
‘We did not set the speech up some kind of head-to-head. This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else,’ underlined US national security adviser Jake Sullivan, stating that Biden’s speech was not planned as a direct rebuttal to Putin.
Rastislav Káčer made the controversial statements on the same TV programme where Speaker of the National Council Boris Kollár expressed similar views last April.
Although Putin was the first world leader Xi Jinping met with outside China since the outbreak of the pandemic, Beijing is probably more interested in a West divided over Ukraine than in Russia itself.