Hungary

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares149 Views

    Man Found in Syria Appears to Be a Missing American

    by

    Syria’s new authorities said on Thursday that an American citizen who had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power had been found outside Damascus and handed over to the rebel group that now controls the capital.In interviews with international news media, the man appeared to identify himself as Travis Timmerman, an American who is believed to have gone missing from Budapest, Hungary, this year. In a video aired on Thursday by the news channel Al Arabiya, someone is heard asking the man if his name is Travis Timmerman. The man says, “That’s right.” Hisham al-Eid, the mayor of Al-Thihabiyeh, a poor, partly rural town east of Damascus, said that the man had been found on Thursday morning on a main road. He was barefoot and cold but otherwise seemed to be in good health, Mr. al-Eid said.The man told reporters that he had entered Syria from Lebanon on a Christian pilgrimage, and had been detained for several months. He said he had received food and water while in detention, and was allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day.In another video posted by Al Arabiya, the man, wearing a beard and a gray hooded top, said that he had been held in a cell alone. When asked how he was freed, he said that on Monday, someone “took a hammer and they broke my door down.”It was not immediately clear where the man had been held. The fall of the authoritarian Assad regime over the weekend to rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has prompted the release of many prisoners held in a sprawling network of detention centers operated by the former government.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Why I’m Not Giving up on American Democracy

      by

      In his dank Budapest prison cell in the mid-1950s, my father imagined he heard Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Though no one in my family had ever set foot in the actual New World, just knowing it existed brought my father solace during his nearly two-year incarceration.Locked up in Soviet-occupied Hungary’s notorious Fo Street fortress, my father was blessedly still unaware that his wife — my mother, a reporter for United Press International — ­occupied a nearby cell. Nor did he know that his two small children, myself and my older sister, were living with strangers paid to look after them by the American wire services, my parents’ employer. Their crime was reporting on the show trials and jailing of priests, nuns and dissidents that Stalinist satellites of the postwar era used to clamp down on dissent.My parents would find it bitterly disappointing that American conservatives, including Donald Trump, have come to admire their small European homeland, with its habit of choosing the wrong side of history, and even to see it as a role model. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has branded Hungary an “illiberal democracy” as he systematically rolls back hard-won freedoms, reinvents its less than glorious past and cozies up to Russia, Hungary’s former occupying power and my parents’ jailer.I recall a different Orban.On June 1989, I stood with tens of thousands of Hungarians in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square during the reburial of the fallen leaders of the 1956 uprising against the Soviet-controlled government. From the podium, a bearded, skinny youth captured our attention with a fiery speech. “If we are sufficiently determined, we can force the ruling party to face free elections,” he shouted, urging negotiations for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. “If we are courageous enough, then and only then, can we fulfill the will of the revolution.” The 26-year-old speaker’s name was Viktor Orban.The events of 1989, when several members of the Eastern Bloc were throwing off the Soviet yoke, were thrilling. Hungary was taking small steps toward democracy, something that I experienced very personally. At my wedding in 1995 in Budapest, my husband, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, announced in his toast, “In marrying Kati, I also welcome Hungary to the family of democracies.” Hungary’s president, Arpad Goncz, four years into his work to democratize the country, was also present.For a time, Mr. Orban, no longer bearded or skinny, head of the youth party Fidesz, befriended Richard and me. He invited us to dinner and the opera, and we hosted him in our New York apartment at a return dinner. (As it happens, the financier and philanthropist George Soros — whom Mr. Orban has aggressively attacked in recent years — was also present on that occasion.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      El posible segundo atentado contra Trump genera alarma en el extranjero

      by

      Existe la preocupación generalizada de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense haya llegado a un punto crítico.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En los nueve años transcurridos desde que Donald Trump entró en la política estadounidense, la percepción global de Estados Unidos se ha visto sacudida por la imagen de una nación fracturada e impredecible. Primero un atentado contra la vida del expresidente, y ahora un segundo posible atentado, han acentuado la preocupación internacional, suscitando temores de una agitación violenta que podría desembocar en una guerra civil.Keir Starmer, el primer ministro británico, ha dicho que está “muy preocupado” y “profundamente perturbado” por lo que, según el FBI, fue un intento de asesinar a Trump en su campo de golf de Florida, a menos de 50 días de las elecciones presidenciales y dos meses después de que una bala ensangrentó la oreja de Trump durante un mitin de campaña en Pensilvania.“La violencia no tiene cabida alguna en un proceso político”, afirmó Starmer.Sin embargo, la violencia ha tenido un lugar preponderante en esta tormentosa y tambaleante campaña política estadounidense, y no solo en los dos posibles intentos de asesinato. Ahora existe una preocupación generalizada en todo el mundo de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense, que solía ser un modelo para el mundo, haya llegado a un punto crítico.En México, donde este año se celebraron las elecciones más violentas de la historia reciente del país, con 41 candidatos y aspirantes a cargos públicos asesinados, el presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador dijo en una publicación en la plataforma social X: “Aun cuando todavía no se conoce bien lo sucedido, lamentamos la violencia producida en contra del expresidente Donald Trump. El camino es la democracia y la paz”.En un momento de guerras en Europa y el Medio Oriente y de inseguridad global generalizada mientras China y Rusia afirman la superioridad de sus modelos autócratas, la precariedad estadounidense pesa bastante.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley

      by

      In Bangladesh, something remarkable has happened. Initially in response to a quota system that reserved the majority of government jobs for specific groups, university students initiated large-scale non-violent protests. Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, responded essentially with “let them eat cake.” Instead of calming the protests down, Hasina’s response made the protests grow nationwide.In mid-July, the government responded with extreme violence, with police gunning down hundreds of students and shutting down the internet across the country. Scenes of extreme police brutality flooded social media. By the end of July, the protests had grown into a nationwide pro-democracy movement. Eventually, the military joined the students, and Hasina fled the country. A nationwide student-led democracy movement successfully challenged a violent autocratic leader, and, at least for now, appears to have won.Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago, an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were instructed not to mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an ultimatum for the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student protests.What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan is the nightmare of every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism.Narendra Modi, India’s autocratic Hindu nationalist prime minister, has ruled the country since 2014. Attacking India’s elite universities as “anti-India” is a hallmark of his government. Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”. With the use of legislation, Orbán’s government went so far as to drive the university out of the country.The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of widespread voter fraud to severely restrict minority voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United States; rigorous investigation estimated it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report by the special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report reveals an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real.Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolution to honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form.Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has claimed that the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”In the fall of 2023, in response to Israel’s brutal retaliation in Gaza for Hamas’s terrorist attack, anti-genocide protests erupted in American universities, with the active participation of a significant number of Jewish students. These anti-genocide protests were labeled as pro-Hamas and used as a basis to attack elite universities, their students, their professors and their administrations, verbally, politically and physically. It is not implausible to take the goal to have been, at least largely, a preliminary show of police power to university students.In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university students and faculty. With great courage and determination, the students in Bangladesh have shown that this strategy can be made to backfire.

      Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and author of Erasing History: How Fascists rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

    • 213 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s love for Viktor Orbán hints at what another Trump term will look like | Jan-Werner Müller

      by

      Donald Trump has not only run the Republican primaries like an incumbent, but on occasion, he gets to play-act the role of president right at home. On Friday, he hosted Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister,, for a quasi-state visit at his Mar-a-Lago estate, described by discerning critics as “the palace of a CEO-president-king, done up in the opulent dictator-chic favored by third-world kleptocrats”.Orbán has spent the past 14 years making his country into a kleptocratic autocracy right in the middle of the European Union. Obviously, Trump does not need general guidance from Orbán; he is already endowed with authoritarian instincts. But, for all the obvious differences between Orbán’s small European nation and the US, Orbán’s rule holds concrete lessons which the American right is ready to adopt. Given the excitement with which Trump acolytes have been promoting Orbán – and their frequent pilgrimages to Budapest as the capital of “national conservatism” – Hungary offers a preview of a second Trump term.Lesson number one: if you want to control the country, you must completely control your own party. After losing two successive national elections at the beginning of this century, it looked like Orbán’s career might be finished. Instead, he managed to govern his Fidesz party with an iron grip. It is not an accident that far-right populist leaders everywhere treat their parties as personal vehicles, with no real internal debates, let alone dissent, tolerated.That has consequences for a political system as a whole: the leader faces no restraints from political heavyweights who are fellow partisans – and who would have credibility with followers – when acting on the national stage. By 2020, Trump had already been transforming the Republican party into a kind of personality cult; that’s one reason nobody stopped him on the road to January 6. Friday marked another step in the total subjugation of the party, as Trump installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair (creating a political family business on the side).Of course, only Trump says the quiet part out loud and declares his desires for dictatorship; he has been raving about Orbán’s credentials as a “strong man” and a real “boss”. Trump’s acolytes are more guarded. One area where they don’t hold back, however, is education – they keep gushing about “Orbán’s model”. JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, has declared universities “the enemy” and advised that “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary”. Supposedly the lesson is not to “eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching”.What’s being previewed here? Hungary happens to be the only country in the European Union with a systematic and structural violation of academic freedom. There it’s the government which decides what counts as an academic subject and what doesn’t (gender studies does not, of course). Orbán has also forced one university to close its doors for evidently political reasons.The ideal is not only to assert control over education and culture but to make the state as such into a partisan instrument. Like other far-right populists, Orbán has replaced career civil servants with loyalists – a lesson US right-wingers are picking up eagerly. Before paying homage to the autocrat-in-exile in Palm Beach, Orbán spoke to the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank that has laid out with chilling precision a Trumpist plan for hijacking what should be a neutral bureaucracy in the name of destroying “the deep state”.Orbán has been Putin’s ally inside the EU, trying to block sanctions and withhold support for Ukraine whenever possible. On the surface, the affinity is ideological: both supposedly believe in “strong families” (never mind how Putin treats his own family, or possibly multiple families) and the assertion of “national sovereignty” in defending borders (never mind whether that involves invading other countries).Yet the relationship is ultimately transactional. Orbán will reach out to whichever power he can – including China and Iran – to bolster his regime at home. The “national conservatism” show, including its American Putin fanboys, is patently useful because it gets critics fixated on issues like same-sex marriage instead of corruption and the destruction of democracy. Trump’s transactional approach was evident during his time in office and, if re-elected, he’ll probably double down on it in a second term.Whether Trump has learned from his experience of the presidency is a hard question. What’s not hard is the question of whether Trump is eager for retribution. Orbán felt it a grave injustice that he lost the 2002 elections; when he returned to office in 2010, he did so with plenty of resentment and a strategy for never letting go of power again. It would be wrong to extrapolate too much from a country with a smaller population than Pennsylvania. But here the parallel between two politicians who Trump himself declared “twins” couldn’t be clearer.
      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Hungary Snubs U.S. Senators Pushing for Sweden’s Entry Into NATO

      by

      Officials in Budapest declined to meet with a bipartisan group of American lawmakers who favor expanding the military alliance.Hungary, the last holdout blocking Sweden’s entry into NATO, thumbed its nose over the weekend at the United States, declining to meet with a bipartisan delegation of senators who had come to press the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban to swiftly approve the Nordic nation’s entry into the military alliance.The snub, which Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, described on Sunday as “strange and concerning,” represented the latest effort by Mr. Orban, a stalwart champion of national sovereignty, to show he will not submit to outside pressure over NATO’s long-stalled expansion.Despite having only 10 million people and accounting for only 1 percent of the European Union’s economic output, Hungary under Mr. Orban has made defiance of more powerful countries its guiding philosophy. “Hungary before all else,” Mr. Orban said on Saturday at the end of a state of the nation address in which he said Europe’s policy of supporting Ukraine had “failed spectacularly.”Legislators from Mr. Orban’s governing Fidesz party and government ministers all declined to meet with the visiting American senators, all of whom are robust supporters of Ukraine.“I’m disappointed to say that nobody from the government would meet with us while we were here,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat and co-chair of the Senate’s NATO Observer Group, said Sunday at a news conference.Speaking a day earlier in Budapest, Hungary’s capital, Mr. Orban restated his previous commitment — so far reneged on — to let Sweden into the alliance as soon as possible. “We are on course to ratify Sweden’s accession to NATO at the beginning of Parliament’s spring session,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      State Dept. Tells Congress It Has Approved Sale of F-16 Jets to Turkey

      by

      The department received documents on Friday signed by Turkey’s leader approving Sweden’s long-delayed entry into NATO. The alliance now awaits word from the lone holdout, Hungary.The State Department notified Congress on Friday that it had approved a $23 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets and related equipment to Turkey after the country’s leader signed documents to allow Sweden’s long-delayed entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, department officials and the Pentagon said.Although Congress could move to formally block the sale, four senior lawmakers told the State Department on Friday evening that they would not object, after their aides reviewed the documents signed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, U.S. officials said.Congressional officials had demanded to see the documents before signaling their approval of the sale, so the State Department asked Turkey to fly the documents to New York on Friday. The department had someone pick up the documents in New York and bring them to Washington by Friday evening to show the lawmakers.The department’s subsequent formal notification to Congress means the sale will almost certainly occur, satisfying Mr. Erdogan’s main condition for supporting Sweden’s accession to NATO and potentially helping bring to a close an episode that has strained relations between the United States and Turkey.Turkey was, along with Hungary, one of two NATO members withholding approval of Sweden’s entry into the alliance. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had undertaken intense diplomacy since last year, including meeting with Mr. Erdogan in Istanbul this month, to try to change the Turkish leader’s mind.Mr. Blinken discussed the issue with Mr. Erdogan in a visit to Turkey in February 2023, and said three times that Turkey would not get the F-16s if it refused to approve Sweden’s accession, a U.S. official said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Orban Urges Hungary’s Parliament to Back Sweden’s NATO Bid

      by

      In a post on social media, the Hungarian leader said he would urge Parliament, as he has done in the past, to vote in favor of Sweden’s admission to the security alliance.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary said on Wednesday that he would “continue to urge” Hungarian legislators to vote in favor of accepting Sweden as a member of NATO, a day after Turkey, the only other holdout, endorsed the Nordic nation’s entry to the military alliance. The Turkish decision left Hungary isolated as the last country that has not yet approved NATO’s expansion. The Hungarian Parliament, which voted to accept Finland into the alliance last spring but left Sweden in limbo, is in winter recess and not currently scheduled to reconvene until Feb. 15.It was unclear whether Mr. Orban’s remarks, posted on the social media platform X after a conversation with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, meant that the Parliament would swiftly vote on Sweden’s membership. He has often said in the past that he wanted Sweden to join NATO but that legislators were “not enthusiastic,” blaming Hungary’s repeated delays in accepting Sweden on the right of legislators to make their own decisions. Most analysts questioned that explanation, noting that Mr. Orban has a tight grip on the governing Fidesz party and that its members, who constitute a large majority in Parliament, invariably follows the prime minister’s instructions. He said on Wednesday that he wanted Parliament to vote in favor of Sweden’s membership “at the first possible opportunity,” but gave no indication of when that might be.Mr. Orban stood alone last month against other European leaders to torpedo an aid package for Ukraine worth $52 billion. Leaders will take another run at convincing Mr. Orban to fall into line when they reconvene on Feb. 1 for an extraordinary summit in Brussels. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Slovakia Appears Set to Join the Putin Sympathizers After Election

      by

      The front-runner in the parliamentary vote has pledged “not to send a single cartridge” to neighboring Ukraine, a sign of the flagging European support for a victim of Russian aggression.The victory of Robert Fico, a former prime minister who took a pro-Russian campaign stance, in Slovakia’s parliamentary elections is a further sign of eroding support for Ukraine in the West as the war drags on and the front line remains largely static.Slovakia is a small country with historical Russian sympathies, and the nature of the coalition government Mr. Fico will seek to form is unclear. He may lean more toward pragmatism, as Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has done since her election last year. Still, the shift in Slovakia is stark: It was the first country to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine.The election results come as disquiet over the billions of dollars in military aid that the West has provided to Ukraine over the past 19 months has grown more acute in the United States and the European Union, with demands increasing for the money to go to domestic priorities instead.House Republicans declined to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in Washington last month, and tensions between Kyiv and the White House over Ukrainian military strategy have surfaced. In Central Europe, once the core of fierce anti-Russian sentiment among fearful frontline states that endured decades of harsh communist rule as reluctant members of the Soviet bloc, the war is now viewed with greater nuance.Mr. Fico’s victory, taking about 23 percent of the vote on a platform that included stopping all arms shipments to Ukraine and placing blame for the war equally on the West and Kyiv, is a case in point.He laced social conservatism, nationalism, anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric and promises of generous welfare handouts in what proved to be an effective anti-liberal agenda, especially in small towns and rural areas.“The wear and tear from the war is more palpable in Central Europe than Western Europe for now,” said Jacques Rupnik, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris and an expert on the region. “Slovakia demonstrates that the threat at your door does not necessarily mean you are full-hearted in support of Ukraine.”Ukrainian artillery positions firing at enemy forces near the front line in the Donbas region this month.Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesA Globsec survey in March of public opinion across Central and Eastern Europe found that 51 percent of Slovaks believed either the West or Ukraine to be “primarily responsible” for the war. Mr. Fico, who served for more than a decade as prime minister until 2018, played off this sentiment.He adopted some of the rhetoric of Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Orban, who has resisted the overwhelming Western position on Ukraine that Russia’s brutal invasion of the country was a flagrant violation of international law that must be resisted in the name of liberty, democracy and the sanctity of national sovereignty.“Fico was inspired by Orban, but does not have the same deep ideological roots, and is more of a pragmatist,” said Ludek Sekyra, a Czech businessman who chairs the Sekyra Foundation, a supporter of liberal causes. “He has been adept in exploiting unease over the vast influx of Ukrainian refugees, small-country resentment of the European Union and Russian sympathies that do not exist in the Czech Republic.”A possible coalition with another former prime minister, Peter Pellegrini of the social democratic Voice party, which won almost 15 percent of the vote, may increase the likelihood of pragmatism from Mr. Fico, who was responsible for Slovakia’s adoption of the euro and has shown strong pro-European sentiments in the past.With Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia all showing significant sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the tides have shifted in this part of Europe. Even Poland, an ardent supporter of Ukraine that has taken in more than 1.5 million refugees from there during the war, recently decided to close its border to low-price Ukrainian grain imports.The governing hard-right nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland is in a tense electoral standoff this month against the liberal opposition. Although the country’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczynski, remains staunchly anti-Russian, his nationalism and conservative values mesh with Mr. Orban’s and Mr. Fico’s. A PiS victory would undermine European unity further as the war shows no sign of a possible resolution.Mr. Kaczynski opposes the kind of European political, military and economic integration of which President Emmanuel Macron of France is a fierce advocate. There has even been murmuring of a possible Polish exit from the European Union — a far-fetched notion but one suggestive of the European tensions that the war has begun to feed.The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, left, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at a news conference in Kyiv on Thursday.Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven in Western Europe, a recent German Marshall Fund survey found that support for Ukrainian membership in the European Union stood at just 52 percent in France and 49 percent in Germany. In Germany, only 45 percent of respondents favored Ukrainian membership in NATO.Still, overall, the survey found that on both sides of the Atlantic, some 69 percent of people favor financial support for Ukraine’s reconstruction, while countries including Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Lithuania showed strong support for the Ukrainian cause across the board.“More and more, we are hearing a clear message to Mr. Zelensky: Please cut a deal with Putin,” said Mr. Rupnik.After the immense sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in defense of their country against a flagrant Russian aggression, that, however, is the thing most difficult for Mr. Zelensky to contemplate, let alone pursue.That a country on the Ukrainian border should now have voted for a man who has said he will “not send a single cartridge” of ammunition across that border can only increase the pressure on Ukraine’s leadership.It also poses evident problems for a European Union already worried that Donald J. Trump may retake the White House next year, and facing internal divisions that a Polish election may sharpen further. More