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How Orbán’s Anti-Ukraine Crusade Fuels Hungary’s Election War Machine
10 October 2025
18 August 2022
The peculiarities of the Russian style of occupation are playing out again in Ukraine. We can infer the Kremlin’s motives by seeing how it has carried out the process many times before.
On 8 August, the head of Russia’s puppet administration of the Zaporizhia region, Yevgeny Balitsky, signed an order to begin organising a ‘referendum on the unification of the Zaporizhia region with the Russian Federation.’
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This move by the pro-Russian official was perceived as the Kremlin’s response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s statement a day earlier. The Ukrainian president warned his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that if any fake ‘referenda’ on the Russian annexation of occupied territories were to be organised, there would be no negotiation process with Russia.