Will Hungary's Orban be the wedge Putin drives between Western allies?
There were pink ankle booties and scuffed sneakers, sensible pumps and leather loafers, a pair of child-sized yellow-rubber rain boots — all laid out on the east bank of the River Danube, in the heart of the Hungarian capital.
The hastily assembled display last month was a tribute to the war dead of Ukraine. It was also a deliberate echo of a permanent memorial nearby, where a row of cast-iron shoes embedded in the riverbank’s paving stones commemorates thousands of people, many of them Jews, who were forced to take off their footwear before being shot by a fascist Hungarian militia in the 1940s.
The modern-day shoe assortment carried another potent meaning too. It represented a rebuke of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, longtime friend to Russian President Vladimir Putin, now newly emboldened by a crushing election victory.
A little more than a week before Sunday’s vote, Orban was name-checked by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who, in a video-link address to European leaders, called on the Hungarian prime minister to visit the riverside memorial to World War II-era victims and reconsider his stance on Ukraine.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/will-hungarys-orban-be-the-wedge-putin-drives-between-western-allies/ar-AAW23gH
Frankly I doubt it but Putin's desperate enough to try anything.