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      US Braces for Potential French Election Shockwave

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      WASHINGTON — U.S. officials are anxiously watching the French presidential election, aware that the outcome of the vote on Sunday could scramble President Biden’s relations with Europe and reveal dangerous fissures in Western democracy.President Emmanuel Macron of France has been a crucial partner as Mr. Biden has rebuilt relations with Europe, promoted democracy and forged a coalition in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But Mr. Macron is in a tight contest with Marine Le Pen, a far-right challenger.Ms. Le Pen is a populist agitator who, in the style of former President Donald J. Trump, scorns European Union “globalists,” criticizes NATO and views President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as an ally.Her victory could complicate Mr. Biden’s effort to isolate Russia and aid Ukraine. But the very real prospect of a nationalist leading France is also a reminder that the recent period of U.S.-European solidarity on political and security issues like Russia and democracy may be fragile. Poland and Hungary, both NATO members, have taken authoritarian turns. And Germany’s surprisingly strong response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is already drawing domestic criticism.“To have a right-wing government come to power in France would be a political earthquake,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown who was the Europe director of the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “It would send a troubling signal about the overall political health of the Western world.”He added: “This is a moment of quite remarkable European unity and resolve. But Le Pen’s election would certainly raise profound questions about the European project.”Mr. Macron was unable to command more than a small plurality of support against several opponents in the first round of voting on April 10. Ms. Le Pen, who finished second, is his opponent in the runoff election on Sunday. Polls show Mr. Macron with a clear lead, but analysts say a Le Pen victory is completely plausible.An immigration hard-liner and longtime leader of France’s populist right, Ms. Le Pen has campaigned mainly on domestic issues, including the rising cost of living. But her foreign policy views have unsettled U.S. officials. Last week, she renewed vows to scale back France’s leadership role in NATO and to pursue “a strategic rapprochement” with Russia after the war with Ukraine has concluded. Ms. Le Pen also expressed concern that sending arms to Ukraine risked drawing other nations into the war.Mr. Macron, right, has been a crucial partner as President Biden has rebuilt relations with Europe.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn a debate on Wednesday, Mr. Macron reminded voters that Ms. Le Pen’s party had taken a loan from a Russian bank. “You depend on Mr. Putin,” he told her.Ms. Le Pen insisted she was “an absolutely and totally free woman” and said she sought foreign cash after French banks refused to lend to her. She also sought to deflect charges that she was sympathetic to Russia’s war aims, declaring her “absolute solidarity” with the Ukrainian people.Ms. Le Pen has also pledged to curtail the influence of the European Union, which the Biden administration sees as a vital counterweight to Russia and China.One senior U.S. official noted that France has a recent history of right-wing candidates striking fear into the political establishment before falling short. That was the case five years ago, when Mr. Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen in a runoff.But recent elections in the West have been prone to upsets, and analysts warned against complacency in Washington, especially given the stakes for the United States.One sign of how much the Biden administration values its partnership with Mr. Macron was the minor sense of crisis after France withdrew its ambassador to Washington in September after the disclosure of a new initiative between the United States and Britain to supply Australia with nuclear submarines.Mr. Macron’s government blamed the Biden administration for the loss of a lucrative submarine contract it had with Australia and was especially angry to learn about the arrangement through a leak to the news media. Biden officials expressed profuse support for France in a flurry of meetings and phone calls, and Mr. Biden called the episode clumsy. France was an “extremely, extremely valued” U.S. partner, he said.If Ms. Le Pen were to win, Mr. Biden’s national security team would be forced to reassess that relationship.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      Macron and Le Pen Trade Punches in Pivotal French Election Debate

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      He attacked the far-right leader as a Putin stooge. She hit back at him as the president of division and contempt.PARIS — In a bruising debate ahead of the vote on Sunday in the French presidential election, President Emmanuel Macron accused his far-right challenger, Marine Le Pen, of being in the pocket of Russia, and she countered with a withering attack on the “unbearable injustice” of Mr. Macron’s economic measures.Interrupting each other and accusing each other of lying, they traded barbs on everything from the environment to pension reform for almost three hours on Wednesday, without ever quite delivering a knockout blow.“When you speak to Russia, you speak to your banker,” Mr. Macron said, suggesting that Ms. Le Pen would be incapable of defending French interests because “you depend on Russian power” and on the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.Mr. Macron was alluding to a 9.4 million-euro loan, then worth $12.2 million, made to Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally party, formerly the National Front, from a Russian bank in 2014. The loan is still not repaid and, after the collapse of the bank in 2016, is now held by a company with ties to the Russian military.“I am a totally free woman,” Ms. Le Pen retorted.She has been a strong supporter of Mr. Putin for many years, approving of his annexation of Crimea in 2014, before recalibrating her position after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “It is dishonest to prevent me from getting a loan from a French bank and then criticize me for seeking it abroad,” she said.After a long campaign, it was their first face-to-face encounter in a debate since 2017, when Mr. Macron made a mockery of Ms. Le Pen’s incoherent plans to take France out of the eurozone, to such effect that the electoral contest was effectively over. He went on to trounce her, 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent.President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen prior to their first debate since 2017. Pool photo by Ludovic MarinThis time, Ms. Le Pen has dropped plans to leave both the European Union and the eurozone as part of a successful attempt to moderate her image, although not the anti-immigrant and nationalist character of her platform. While she suffered through some difficult moments in the debate, appearing lost on the subject of the ballooning debt France incurred in battling Covid-19, she generally held her own.Ms. Le Pen’s campaign has prospered through close attention to the pocketbook problems of millions of French people facing rising inflation. She stuck close to these issues in the debate, telling Mr. Macron that his attempt to raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 was “an intolerable injustice.” In her program, she said, full pensions would be payable between the ages of 60 and 62.When Mr. Macron suggested she would not be able to pay for this and was being “dishonest” with people, Ms. Le Pen shot back: “Don’t give me lessons on the financing of my project, because when we are counting 600 billion euros in debt, you should be modest.”This exasperated Mr. Macron. Crossing his arms, occasionally slumped or with his hand on his chin, by turns ironic and supercilious, he ran the risk of looking arrogant or condescending, a criticism frequently leveled at him over the past five years.The debt, he said, was incurred under his “whatever-it-takes” response to the pandemic that offered paid furlough programs, subsidies for shuttered businesses, and a wide array of other assistance.“What would you have done?” he demanded more than once of Ms. Le Pen, without ever getting a direct response. She did not seem to have one and looked flummoxed. It was, Mr. Macron noted, the worst pandemic in a century.The latest polls give Mr. Macron 55 percent of the vote and Ms. Le Pen 45 percent. Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe election is being closely watched in part because a Le Pen victory, although improbable, appears possible. It did not seem any less so after the debate, a sharp confrontation of alternating fortunes that in the end had the feel of a draw.The latest polls, published before the debate, give Ms. Le Pen 45 percent of the vote to Mr. Macron’s 55 percent. With her anti-NATO views, her perception of the United States as an intruder in Europe, and her insistence on a foreign policy “equidistant” from Washington and Moscow, she would almost certainly pose a threat to the allied unity forged by President Biden in response Russia’s war in Ukraine.In an interview on the French TV station BFM just before the debate, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said: “While I do not think that I have the right to influence what happens in your country, I want to say I have a relationship with Emmanuel Macron and I would not want to lose that.”He added that Ms. Le Pen was wrong in her views about Russia-Ukraine issues. “If Le Pen understands that she has made a mistake, our relationship could change,” he said.Hostile to the European Union, and fiercely critical of Germany, Ms. Le Pen would also menace the foundation of the process of European integration, built since 1945 on Franco-German reconciliation.Ms. Le Pen called Mr. Macron a “punitive ecologist” and mounted an effective assault on his highly personal way of governing that has reduced the role of the legislature.She criticized him for pushing people who could not afford it to buy expensive electric cars, for example, and for demanding a transition to a post-carbon economy “that should be a lot less rapid” given the hardships many people face.Mr. Macron accused Ms. Le Pen of being a “climate skeptic.” She retorted that he was “a climate hypocrite.”It was Mr. Macron’s attempt to raise diesel fuel prices for environmental reasons that triggered the Yellow Vest protest movement that started in 2018.“The Yellow Vests told you they wanted more democracy and they were not heard,” she said. “I think the biggest problem at the end of these five years is the disunion, the division, that you have caused among the French people, the feeling of contempt they have, the feeling of not being listened to, of not being heard, of not being consulted.”Now was the time, she added, “to stitch French democracy together” again.How Ms. Le Pen would do this through a political program certain to antagonize France’s more than six million Muslims, as well as many foreigners living in France, is unclear. While she insisted she had nothing against Islam as a religion, she said that an Islamist ideology was “attacking the foundations of our Republic.”What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      Your Monday Evening Briefing

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      Daniel E. Slotnik and (Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.)Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.Firefighters at the scene of a missile strike in Lviv, Ukraine, today. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times1. Russia has begun its offensive in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials said.“Now we can state that the Russian forces have started the battle for the Donbas that they have been getting ready for a long time,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address.Russia claimed today that it had hit some 300 Ukrainian targets, mostly in the east, in one of the broadest barrages of missile attacks in weeks. There was also a missile strike on the western city of Lviv, which had been relatively unscathed until now. Seven people there died. Russian forces are closing in on a complete capture of the city of Mariupol, which would be a major strategic prize in the fight.In Russia, the central bank chief warned that ripple effects from Western sanctions were only beginning to spread, despite President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia’s economy remains stable. Moscow’s mayor said 200,000 jobs were at risk in the Russian capital alone.Travelers may no longer need to wear masks in U.S. airportsAlyssa Pointer for The New York Times2. A federal judge struck down the mask requirement on planes and public transit in the U.S.The ruling came days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended the federal transportation mask requirement through May 3. The judge in Florida said that the mandate “exceeds the C.D.C.’s statutory authority.”The judge’s decision apparently shuts down the requirement for people to wear masks on airplanes, in airports and while taking other public transportation. It was not immediately clear whether the Justice Department would appeal the judge’s order, which could keep the rule in place while the matter undergoes further litigation.In other Covid news, Philadelphia became the first major city in the U.S. to reinstate a mask rule in response to rising cases of the coronavirus. In China, several economic indicators show that Covid lockdowns could have a disastrous effect on the country’s economy.And in Shanghai, the authorities announced that some workers might have to live at their workplaces even after the city lifts its lockdown.Allies of former President Donald Trump are renewing a push to overturn the 2020 election.Veasey Conway for The New York Times3. Some Trump allies are pushing to “decertify” the 2020 vote in key states and overturn the election.More than a year after failing to cancel the 2020 election results, some of the same lawyers and associates are still insisting that former President Donald Trump won. In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, Trump allies are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. The efforts, dismissed as preposterous by many legal experts, are nonetheless stoking Trump supporters’ grievances. Democrats and some Republicans have raised deep concerns about the effect of the decertification efforts, including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021.Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir won the 126th Boston Marathon’s women’s division.Winslow Townson/Associated Press4. Peres Jepchirchir and Evans Chebet won the Boston Marathon.Jepchirchir finished the 26.2-mile course in 2 hours 21 minutes 1 second, beating Ababel Yeshaneh in the women’s division by just four seconds in a sprint to the finish line.Evans Chebet won the men’s race with a time of 2 hours 6 minutes 51 seconds, his first victory at a major marathon. The Boston Marathon returned to its traditional slot on the springtime calendar after three years.In 2020, the race was canceled for the first time in its history. And last year, the race was pushed to October, when it competed for elite entrants with a cluster of other marathons. We have highlights from the race.Alex Jones addressed Trump supporters in 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times5. Alex Jones’s Infowars and two affiliated companies filed for bankruptcy.The Infowars filing, which was made yesterday, came after courts in two states ruled against Jones, a far-right broadcaster, in defamation lawsuits by families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.For years, Jones spread bogus theories that the shooting, which killed 20 elementary school students and six educators, was part of a government-led plot to deprive Americans of their guns and that the victims’ families were actors in the scheme. Two other companies connected to Jones, IWHealth and Prison Planet TV, also filed for bankruptcy protection. A homeless encampment along Glendale Boulevard in Los Angeles last month.Mark Abramson for The New York Times6. More than ever it has become deadly to be homeless in the U.S., especially for men in their 50s and 60s.There are many factors behind these lonely deaths: the aging of the unsheltered population; the wider availability of fentanyl, a fast-acting and dangerous opiate; the lack of treatment for chronic illnesses and the long-term health damage from years on the street. In many cities the number of homeless deaths doubled during the pandemic, and the problem is especially acute in California, where about one in four of the nation’s 500,000 homeless people live.“It’s like a wartime death toll in places where there is no war,” said Maria Raven, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco who co-wrote a study about homeless deaths.The four co-CEOs of the Lede Company at their New York City office.OK McCausland for The New York Times7. Meet the women of the Lede Company. They’re some of Hollywood’s top publicists (just don’t ask why).Their clients include Lady Gaga, Pharrell Williams, Emma Stone, Ariana Grande, Charlize Theron and the Obamas. And oh yes, an actor named Will Smith (about whom they have no comment). Discretion is their craft, making it tough for our reporter to get her subjects to open up.Marcy Engelman, Julia Roberts’s longtime publicist, did say of Amanda Silverman, one of Lede’s heads: “She knows how to play the game. She is very well liked, so she must take care of people.”Workers on the production line of the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times8. Ford’s new pickup truck could determine whether the automaker can survive in an industry dominated by Tesla.Driven by the dizzying success of Tesla, sales of electric vehicles appear to be on an unstoppable rise, and automakers are spending tens of billions of dollars to prepare to meet that demand.The question for Ford is whether Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive and a car guy from the Detroit area, can channel his inner Elon Musk. Farley, and Ford, are betting big on the F-150 Lightning, an electric version of the company’s signature pickup that could become one of the most important vehicles in the company’s 113-year history.The Gravity Diagnostics lab in Kentucky where an unwanted birthday party was thrown. Liz Dufour/The Enquirer via Imagn Content Services, LLC9. They wished him a “Happy Birthday!” he didn’t want. He sued and won $450,000.A Kentucky man, Kevin Berling, asked his manager at a medical lab to be sure no one threw him a birthday party. Berling has an anxiety disorder and knew the party would trigger it. But while the manager was away, Berling’s colleagues planned a celebration.After hearing of it, Berling spent the time in his car. Two supervisors confronted him about his “somber behavior.” After having a panic attack in the meeting, he was fired. A month later, he sued the company for disability discrimination.In other acts of workplace dissent, a Dollar General employee who loved her job but thought it needed improvements opened up on a TikTok series that went viral. She was fired.We say we like creative thinking and thinkers but our gut response isn’t always in sync.Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka10. And finally, we look up to great artists, scientists and inventors. Or do we?The new science of implicit bias suggests we may talk a good game about admiring creativity but many of us are suspicious of it. Without realizing it, we may see creativity as disturbing.“People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison,” said Dr. Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Goncalo has looked at what spurs or hinders creators in studies. One main conclusion? Often, people’s subconscious views of creativity reflect a fear of change or uncertainty; creativity disrupts, and we like stability.Have an original eveningHannah Yoon and Eve Edelheit compiled photos for this briefing. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here.What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee and Wordle. If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here. More

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      Captured Ukrainian Oligarch Was Figure in Russian Election Meddling Investigation

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      His name had surfaced as an influential figure in Ukraine with potential inside knowledge of Russian electoral meddling in the United States, though for years he had steadfastly denied it.But in recent days, the ground has shifted dramatically under Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician who is a close confidant of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and who had also been a client of the Republican political consultant Paul J. Manafort.Mr. Medvedchuk went into hiding early in the war, Ukrainian officials say, and was detained this week. President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on Tuesday a picture on Telegram of the politician, looking tired and disheveled, wearing handcuffs. He was arrested after violating terms of his house arrest while awaiting trial for treason, in a case opened last year.That case is related to coal trading with pro-Russian separatists, but more broadly it has to do with the swirl of financial and political intrigue surrounding Moscow’s operations to influence politics in foreign countries.For now, it’s unclear whether Mr. Medvedchuk will ever testify in court in Ukraine or be interviewed by investigators looking into Russian influence operations elsewhere. Mr. Zelensky said he would seek to trade Mr. Medvedchuk to Russia for Ukrainian prisoners of war.“I offer the Russian Federation to trade your man for our boys and girls now in captivity,” Mr. Zelensky said. “It’s important our law enforcement and military study such a possibility.”A trade would presumably put Mr. Medvedchuk in Russia, out of reach of researchers tracking Russian attempts to influence political outcomes abroad, in which Mr. Medvedchuk is said to have played a central role in Ukraine.A photo released by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office Tuesday shows Viktor Medvedchuk in handcuffs after he was detained.Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, via Associated PressHis relevance to Russian electoral meddling in the United States related to his ties to Mr. Manafort, and he was not described as playing a central role in a special prosecutor’s report or in two federal trials of Mr. Manafort.Still, Mr. Medvedchuk has been close both politically and personally to Mr. Putin for more than two decades, and he was a prominent figure in the pro-Russian wing of Ukrainian politics, a circle where Mr. Manafort found several clients.Mr. Putin is the godfather to Mr. Medvedchuk’s daughter. The two men met frequently over the years, and Russian air traffic control authorities granted special exemptions for Mr. Medvedchuk’s private jet on flights to Moscow, he said in an interview in 2017.Some European politicians, including the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, had publicly endorsed a role for Mr. Medvedchuk as an intermediary in the standoff between Russia and Ukraine, given his personal ties to Mr. Putin.But in Ukraine, outside of a narrow base of support mostly in the country’s east, he was widely viewed as a loathsome quisling who had reaped wealth from energy deals with the Kremlin while promoting Russian foreign policy goals, including weakening the central government under a federalization overhaul that he had championed for years.At various times, he had served as deputy speaker of Parliament, a presidential adviser and a negotiator in prisoner exchanges with Russia. And as a figure at the nexus of various financial and political influence operations run by the Kremlin, Mr. Medvedchuk’s importance extended beyond Ukraine.Mr. Manafort, before he became chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, worked for a decade as a consultant for Russian-leaning politicians in Ukraine, including the Opposition Bloc party, in which Mr. Medvedchuk was one of three leading figures.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4U.S. support. More

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      In French Election, Le Pen and Macron Court Voters With Emotion

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      PARIS — The future of democracy in Europe is being decided simultaneously on the battlefields of Ukraine and in the ballot boxes of France.From afar, France’s presidential elections this month might look like merely a repeat of our last elections in 2017, with the centrist leader Emmanuel Macron once again facing Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party. But there are major differences that are revealing about France and about Western pluralism, having to do with the return of war in Europe; the uncertainty created by the two candidates running so closely in Sunday’s first-round election; and the widespread disaffection for both candidates.Indeed, the April 24 runoff election may be France’s most consequential turning point in the past 40 years. It could usher in an entirely new political and social era, in which illiberal democracy, personified in Ms. Le Pen, could gain the upper hand in one of the founding members of the European Union. And regardless of the winner, the country faces a deep paralysis because it’s unclear whether either candidate will gain a majority in legislative elections later this spring. That means neither Ms. Le Pen’s nativist hopes will be met nor will Mr. Macron’s efforts to further liberalize the French economy materialize, a result that could further alienate citizens from politics.Where the 2017 election was about the hope of reforming France and remaining a liberal democracy, 2022 is a tight contest between two emotions: anger against Mr. Macron, who is perceived as a technocrat out of touch with the people, and fear of Ms. Le Pen, who is still seen by many as a dangerous far-right candidate. In both cases most voters will vote against, rather than for, a candidate. The question of the day remains: Do you hate Mr. Macron more than you fear Ms. Le Pen, or vice versa?What is yet to be seen is whether Ms. Le Pen will fully capitalize on voters’ anger toward Mr. Macron for his perceived aloofness and closeness to the richest segment of French society, as well as for the contours of his policy. His emphasis on pushing back the retirement age from 62 to 65, even if he has started to retreat on that promise, speaking of 64 as a reasonable compromise, has rankled voters.In her effort to pick up centrist votes, Ms. Le Pen appeared at times almost moderate, particularly compared with her more radical rival Éric Zemmour. In the run-up to Sunday’s first-round election, Ms. Le Pen benefited from Mr. Zemmour’s penchant for furiously railing about defending French identity and the need to create a ministry charged with expelling foreigners. Meanwhile, she was appearing on social media, speaking of her love for her cats.That worked for Ms. Le Pen in round one. But to gain enough votes to become president of France, she will most likely have to rally the extreme edges of her party, in part by returning to espousing hard-line views. It may not be that difficult. Behind her reassuring rhetoric, her more extreme policies remain intact. She has promised to ban the hijab in all public places, a nod toward her longstanding public antipathy to Islam; she has long spoken of curbing immigration and has said she will prioritize the native-born French for welfare benefits over immigrants.To be sure, by appealing to the extreme right, Ms. Le Pen also runs the risk of failing to win over middle-of-the-road French voters who are more likely to vote for Mr. Macron or abstain rather than vote for her.The dilemma of Mr. Macron is just the reverse. He needs the support of the far left, which now largely means supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — who came in a very close third in round one — to win. It will be difficult for Mr. Macron to do so without diluting his economic program, which might lose him significant votes on the right.Complicating matters further, the coming runoff election may prove to be the closest since the victory of our longest-serving president, the socialist François Mitterrand, over the conservative Valery Giscard d’Estaing in 1981. It would be tempting to see the elections of 2022 as a distorted mirror of that fateful year. But 1981 was the triumph of hope bringing the socialists to power, which was, until then, an unheard-of possibility. Should Ms. Le Pen succeed, it would be a victory of anger.Such an outcome is not impossible. The voices of the extreme-right and extreme-left candidates together now add up to more than 50 percent of the vote. Those strengthening extremes signal that one in two French people no longer believes in classical liberal democracy as this country once knew it or in the future of the European project in which France has played an integral part.After all, Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her disdain for the European Union, once suggested leaving the common currency and still hopes France might all but abandon NATO.Then there’s the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Initially the prospect of war worked in favor of the incumbent president. Mr. Macron’s early efforts at diplomacy and meeting with Vladimir Putin gave him an early advantage with voters. Then he found himself facing the economic consequences of the conflict, including the steep rise in the cost of living across France, the very subject chosen by Ms. Le Pen as her core campaign topic.Yet it is unclear whether the reality of the war so close to France will discredit Ms. Le Pen (who, despite having denounced the invasion, had close ties with Russia in the past and whose party received loans from a Russian bank). In the end, as they say, all politics is local. The French will not be voting for Ukraine, and a majority of them may not care that much about the future of Europe, either.For Mr. Macron, however, his fortunes are bound up with Europe’s, and his challenge is energizing the electorate to care enough about both him and the continent. In the coming days, he is likely to try to convince more French voters that a victory for Ms. Le Pen is a victory for Mr. Putin and that Ukraine and democracy will only suffer if she takes up residence in the Élysée Palace. Whether he can do so will be a test of France’s deep polarization. The haves — those with more wealth and education — skew disproportionately toward Mr. Macron, while the have-nots lean toward Ms. Le Pen. But even this doesn’t give the full picture: Beyond anger, we are also seeing a profound disillusionment with politics. More than 26 percent of voters abstained in the first round of elections, the lowest turnout for a presidential election since 2002.In 2017, after the triumph of Brexit in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in America, the election of Mr. Macron appeared as an oasis of hope in a desert of Anglo-Saxon despair. Now, in 2022, the West is right to remain concerned about the political future of France.With two weeks left to go, the election of a far-right leader in France remains possible but not probable. But let us be clear. What is at stake on April 24 is nothing less than the future of democracy in France and in Europe.Dominique Moïsi is a senior adviser at the Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think tank.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump and Ukraine: Former Advisers Revisit What Happened

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of Ukraine and another former Soviet state, Georgia, beginning the process of obtaining NATO membership.In the Oval Office, Hill recalls, describing a scene that has not been previously reported, she told Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that offering a membership path to Ukraine and Georgia could be problematic. While Bush’s appetite for promoting the spread of democracy had not been dampened by the Iraq war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks. He would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the United States’ key NATO allies opposed the idea. Cheney took umbrage at Hill’s assessment. “So, you’re telling me you’re opposed to freedom and democracy,” she says he snapped. According to Hill, he abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office.“He’s just yanking your chain,” she remembers Bush telling her. “Go on with what you were saying.” But the president seemed confident that he could win over the other NATO leaders, saying, “I like it when diplomacy is tough.” Ignoring the advice of Hill and the U.S. intelligence community, Bush announced in Bucharest that “NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan.” Hill’s prediction came true: Several other leaders at the summit objected to Bush’s recommendation. NATO ultimately issued a compromise declaration that would prove unsatisfying to nearly everyone, stating that the two countries “will become members” without specifying how and when they would do so — and still in defiance of Putin’s wishes. (They still have not become members.)“It was the worst of all possible worlds,” Hill said to me in her austere English accent as she recalled the episode over lunch this March. As one of the foremost experts on Putin and a current unofficial adviser to the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine war, Hill, 56, has already made a specialty of issuing warnings about the Russian leader that have gone unheeded by American presidents. As she feared, the carrot dangled by Bush to two countries — each of which gained independence in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and afterward espoused democratic ambitions — did not sit well with Putin. Four months after the 2008 NATO summit, Russian troops crossed the border and launched an attack on the South Ossetia region of Georgia. Though the war lasted only five days, a Russian military presence would continue in nearly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And after the West’s weak pushback against his aggression, Putin then set his sights on Ukraine — a sovereign nation that, Putin claimed to Bush at the Bucharest summit, “is not a country.”Hill would stay on in the same role in the Obama administration for close to a year. Obama’s handling of Putin did not always strike her as judicious. When Chuck Todd of NBC asked Obama at a news conference in 2013 about his working relationship with Putin, Obama replied, “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Hill told me that she “winced” when she heard his remark, and when Obama responded to Putin’s invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region Crimea a year later by referring to Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” she winced again. “We said openly, ‘Don’t dis the guy — he’s thin-skinned and quick to take insults,’” Hill said of this counsel to Obama about Putin. “He either didn’t understand the man or willfully ignored the advice.”Hill was sharing these accounts at an Indian restaurant in Colorado, where she had selected some of the least spicy items on the menu, reminding me, “I’m still English,” though she is a naturalized U.S. citizen. The restaurant was a few blocks from the University of Denver campus, where Hill had just given a talk about Russia and Ukraine, one of several she would give that week.Her descriptions of Russia’s president to her audience that morning — “living in his own bubble”; “a germaphobe”; “a shoot-the-messenger kind of person” — were both penetrating and eerily reminiscent of another domineering leader she came to know while serving as the National Security Council’s senior director of Russian and European affairs from April 2017 to July 2019. Though it stood to reason that a Putinologist of Fiona Hill’s renown would be much in demand after the invasion of Ukraine this February, it surprised me that her tenure in the Trump administration almost never came up in these discussions.The Colorado events were part of a book tour that was scheduled long before the Russian attack. Her memoir, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” traces the journey of a literal coal miner’s daughter from working-class England to the White House. But it covers a period that can be understood as a prelude to the current conflict — Hill was present for the initial phase of Trump’s scheme to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who was elected in 2019, by withholding military aid in exchange for political favors. It is also an insider’s look at a chaotic, reckless and at times antidemocratic chief executive. (In response to queries for this article, Trump said of Hill: “She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing.”)Her assessment of the former president has new resonance in the current moment: “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.”Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin arriving for a joint news conference in Helsinki in 2018.Photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times
      Looking back on the Trump years, Hill has slowly come to recognize the unsettling significance in disparate incidents and episodes that she did not have the arm’s-length view to appreciate in the moment. During our lunch, we discussed what it was like for her and others to have worked for Trump after having done the same for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Her meeting in the Bush White House in 2008, Hill told me, offered a sharp contrast to the briefings she sat in on during her tumultuous two years of service in the Trump administration. Unlike Trump, President Bush had read his briefing materials. His questions were respectful. She offered him an unpopular opinion and was not punished or frozen out for it. Even the vice president’s dyspeptic behavior that day did not unnerve her, she told me. “His emphasis was on the power of the executive branch,” she said. “It wasn’t on the unchecked power of one executive. And it was never to overturn the Constitution.”Of her experience trying to steer policy during her two years in the Trump White House, Hill said: “It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self.”With a flash of a smile, she said: “We used to have this running shtick in our office at the N.S.C. As a kid, I was a great fan of Tolkien and ‘Lord of the Rings.’ So, in the Trump administration, we’d talk about the ring, and the fear of becoming Gollum” — the character deformed by his attachment to the powerful treasure — “obsessing over ‘my precious,’ the excitement and the power of being in the White House. And I did see a lot of people slipping into that.” When I asked Hill whom she saw as the Gollums in the Trump White House, she replied crisply: “The ones who wouldn’t testify in his impeachment hearing. Quite a few people, in other words.”Fiona Hill emerged as a U.S. government expert on Russia amid a generation in which the subjects of Russia and Eastern Europe all but disappeared from America’s collective consciousness. Raised in economically depressed North East England, Hill, as a brainy teenager, was admonished by her father, who was then a hospital porter, “There is nothing for you here,” and so she moved to the United States in 1989 after a year’s study in Moscow. Hill received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and later got a job at the Brookings Institution. In 2006, she became the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. By that time, the Bush administration was keenly focused on post-Cold War and post-Sept. 11 adversaries both real and imagined, in Afghanistan and Iraq.The ambitions of Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, were steadily made manifest. On March 19, 2016, two years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, a hacker working with Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U., sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, from the address no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com. The email, which claimed that a Ukrainian had compromised Podesta’s password, turned out to be a successful act of spearphishing. It allowed Russia to obtain and release, through WikiLeaks, 50,000 of Podesta’s emails, all in the furtherance of Russia’s desire that Clinton would become, if not a defeated presidential candidate, then at minimum a damaged one.The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin “should release” dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor.Trump and Putin at a working lunch in Helsinki. Fiona Hill is second from left.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHill had not expected to be a fly on the White House wall for several of these moments. She even participated in the Women’s March in Washington the day following Trump’s inauguration. But then, the next day, she was called in for an interview with Keith Kellogg, at the time the N.S.C. chief of staff. Hill had previously worked with Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and several times had been on the Fox News foreign-policy online show hosted by K.T. McFarland, who had become the deputy national security adviser; the expectation was that she could become an in-house counterweight to Putin’s influence. She soon joined the administration on a two-year assignment.Just four months into his presidency, Trump welcomed two of Putin’s top subordinates — Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — into the Oval Office. Their meeting became public only because a photographer with the Russian news agency Tass released an image of the three men laughing together.As N.S.C. senior director for European and Russian affairs, Hill was supposed to be in the Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. But that plan was scotched after her previous sit-down with Trump did not go well: The president had mistaken her for a secretary and became angry that she did not immediately agree to retype a news release for him. Just after the Russians left the Oval Office, Hill learned that Trump boasted to them about firing James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., saying that he had removed a source of “great pressure” — and that he continued to do so in his next meeting, with Henry Kissinger, though the former secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had come to the White House to discuss Russia.Hill never developed the rapport with Trump that McFarland, Kellogg and H.R. McMaster (who replaced Flynn), her direct superiors, had presumably hoped for. Instead, Trump seemed more impressed with the former Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state. “He’s done billion-dollar energy deals with Putin,” Hill says Trump exclaimed at a meeting.‘The domestic political errands, the way Trump had privatized foreign policy for his own purposes. It was this narrow goal: his desire to stay in power, irrespective of what other people wanted.’Trump’s ignorance of world affairs would have been a liability under any circumstance. But it put him at a pronounced disadvantage when it came to dealing with those strongmen for whom he felt a natural affinity, like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Once, while Trump was discussing Syria with Erdogan, Hill recalled: “Erdogan goes from talking about the history of the Ottoman Empire to when he was mayor of Istanbul. And you can see he’s not listening and has no idea what Erdogan’s talking about.” On another occasion, she told me, Trump cheerfully joked to Erdogan that the basis of most Americans’ knowledge about Turkey was “Midnight Express,” a 1978 movie that primarily takes place inside a Turkish prison. “Bad image — you need to make a different film,” Hill recalled Trump telling Turkey’s president while she thought to herself, Oh, my God, really?When I mentioned to Hill that former White House aides had told me about Trump’s clear preference for visual materials over text, she exclaimed: “That’s spot on. There were several moments of just utter embarrassment where he would see a magazine story about one of his favorite leaders, be it Erdogan or Macron. He’d see a picture of them, and he’d want it sent to them through the embassies. And when we’d read the articles, the articles are not flattering. They’re quite critical. Obviously, we can’t send this! But then he’d want to know if they’d gotten the picture and the article, which he’d signed: ‘Emmanuel, you look wonderful. Looking so strong.’”Hill found it dubious that a man so self-​interested and lacking in discipline could have colluded with Russia to gain electoral victory in 2016, a concern that led to investigations by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Robert Mueller, the special counsel. For that matter, she told me, she had met the Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page a few times in Moscow. “I was incredulous as to how anyone could think he could be a spy. I thought he was way out of his depth.” The same held true for George Papadopoulos, another foreign-​policy adviser. “Every campaign has loads of clueless people,” she said.Still, she came to see in Trump a kind of aspirational authoritarianism in which Putin, Erdogan, Orban and other autocrats were admired models. She could see that he regarded the U.S. government as his family-run business. In viewing how Trump’s coterie acted in his presence, Hill settled on the word “thrall,” evoking both a mystical attraction and servitude. Trump’s speeches habitually emphasized mood over thought, to powerful effect. It did not escape Hill’s attention that Trump’s chief speechwriter — indeed, the gatekeeper of whatever made its way into the president’s speeches — was Stephen Miller, who always seemed near Trump and whose influence on administration policy was “immense,” she says. Hill recalled for me a time in 2019 when Trump was visiting London and she found herself traveling through the city in a vehicle with Miller. “He was talking about all the knife fights that immigrants were causing in these areas,” she said. “And I told him: ‘These streets were a lot rougher when I was growing up and they were run by white gangs. The immigrants have actually calmed things down.’” (Miller declined to comment on the record.)More than once during our conversations, Hill made references to the Coen brothers filmmaking team. In particular, she seemed to relate to the character played by Frances McDormand in the movie “Fargo”: a habitually unflappable police chief thrust into a narrative of bizarre misdeeds for which nothing in her long experience has prepared her. Hill was dismayed, but not surprised, she told me, when President Trump carried on about a Democratic rival, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to a foreign leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — referring to Warren as “Senator Pocahontas,” while Merkel gaped in astonishment. Or when, upon learning from Prime Minister Erna Solberg of Norway of her country’s reliance on hydropower, Trump took the opportunity to share his standard riff on the evils of wind turbines.But she was alarmed, Hill told me, by Trump’s antidemocratic monologues. “He would constantly tell world leaders that he deserved a redo of his first two years,” she recalled. “He’d say that his first two years had been taken away from him because of the ‘Russia hoax.’ And he’d say that he wanted more than two terms.”“He said it as a joke,” I suggested.“Except that he clearly meant it,” Hill insisted. She mentioned David Cornstein, a jeweler by trade and longtime friend of Trump’s whom the president appointed as his ambassador to Hungary. “Ambassador Cornstein openly talked about the fact that Trump wanted the same arrangement as Viktor Orban” — referring to the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, who has held his position since 2010 — “where he could push the margins and stay in power without any checks and balances.” (Cornstein could not be reached for comment.)During Trump’s first year in office, he initially resisted meeting with President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine. Obama received Poroshenko in the Oval Office in June 2014, and the United States offered Ukraine financial and diplomatic support, while stopping short of providing requested Javelin anti-tank missiles, in part out of concerns that Russian assets within Ukraine’s intelligence community would have access to the technology, according to a 2019 NBC News interview with the former C.I.A. director John Brennan. Now, with Trump’s refusal to meet with Poroshenko, it instead fell to Vice President Mike Pence to welcome the Ukrainian leader to the White House on June 20, 2017. After their meeting, Poroshenko lingered in a West Wing conference room, waiting to see if Trump would give him a few minutes.Finally, the president did so. The two men shook hands and exchanged pleasantries in front of the White House press corps. Once the reporters were ushered out, Trump flatly told Poroshenko that Ukraine was a corrupt country. Trump knew this, he said, because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him so.Poroshenko said that his administration was addressing the corruption. Trump shared another observation. He said, echoing a Putin talking point, that Crimea, annexed three years earlier through Putin’s act of aggression, was rightfully Russia’s — because, after all, the people there spoke Russian.Poroshenko protested, saying that he, too, spoke Russian. So, for that matter, did one of the witnesses to this conversation: Marie Yovanovitch, then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who was born in Canada, later acquiring U.S. citizenship, and who recounted the episode in her recent memoir, “Lessons From the Edge.” Recalling Trump’s words to me, Yovanovitch laughed in disbelief and said, “I mean, in America, we speak English, but it doesn’t make us British!”Trump in the Oval Office in 2017 with Petro Poroshenko, who was the president of Ukraine at the time.Evan Vucci/Associated PressThe encounter with Poroshenko would portend other unsettling interactions with Ukraine during the Trump era. “There were all sorts of tells going on that, while official U.S. policy toward Ukraine was quite good, that he didn’t personally love that policy,” Yovanovitch told me. “So there was always the feeling of, What’s going to happen next?”What happened next was that Trump began to treat Ukraine as a political enemy. Bridling at the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in hopes of damaging his opponent or helping his campaign, he was receptive to the suggestion of an appealing counternarrative. “By early 2018, he began to hear and repeat the assertion that it was Ukraine and not Russia that had interfered in the election, and that they had done so to try to help Clinton,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser, told me. “I knew he heard that from, among others, Rudy Giuliani. Each time that inaccurate theory was raised, I disputed it and reminded the president that it was not true, including one time when I said so in front of Mr. Giuliani.”By 2019, a number of once-obscure Trump foreign-policy aides — among them Fiona Hill; her successor, Timothy Morrison; Yovanovitch; Yovanovitch’s deputy, George P. Kent; her political counselor, David Holmes; her successor, William B. Taylor Jr.; the N.S.C.’s director for European affairs, Alexander Vindman; the special adviser to the vice president on European and Russian affairs, Jennifer Williams; and the U.S. special representative to Ukraine, Kurt D. Volker — would be tugged into the vortex of a sub rosa scheme. It was, as Hill would memorably testify to Congress later that year, “a domestic political errand” in Ukraine on behalf of President Trump. That errand, chiefly undertaken by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, would garishly illustrate how “Trump was using Ukraine as a plaything for his own purposes,” Hill told me.The first notable disruption in U.S.-Ukraine relations during Trump’s presidency came when Yovanovitch was removed from her ambassadorial post at Trump’s orders. Though she was widely respected in diplomatic circles, Yovanovitch’s ongoing efforts to root out corruption in Ukraine had put her in the cross hairs of two Soviet-born associates of Giuliani who were doing business in the country. Those associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, told Trump that Yovanovitch — who had served in the State Department going back to the Reagan administration — was critical of Trump. She soon became the target of negative pieces in the publication The Hill by John Solomon, a conservative writer with connections to Giuliani, including an allegation by Yuriy Lutsenko, the prosecutor general of Ukraine, that the ambassador had given him a “do not prosecute list” — which Lutsenko later recanted to a Ukrainian publication. The same month that he did so, April 2019, Yovanovitch was recalled from her post.Marie Yovanovitch during impeachment-inquiry hearings in November 2019.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe career ambassador and other officials urgently requested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson, issue a statement of support for her. Pompeo did not do so; according to a former senior White House official, he was eager to develop a closer bond with Trump and knew that Giuliani had the president’s ear. Subsequently, a top adviser to the secretary, Michael McKinley, resigned in protest. According to a source familiar with the matter, Pompeo responded angrily, telling McKinley that his resignation stood as proof that State Department careerists could not be counted on to loyally support President Trump’s policies. (Through a spokesman, Pompeo declined to comment on the record.)By the spring of 2019, Trump seemed to be persuaded not only that Yovanovitch was, as Trump would later tell Zelensky, “bad news” but that Ukraine was demonstrably anti-Trump. On April 21, 2019, the president called Zelensky, who had just been elected, to congratulate him on his victory. Trump decided that he would send Pence to attend Zelensky’s inauguration. Less than three weeks later, Giuliani disclosed to The Times that he planned to soon visit Ukraine to encourage Zelensky to pursue inquiries into the origins of the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and into Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and whose father, Joe Biden, had just announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination. (Giuliani later canceled his travel plans.)At about the same time, Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, announced to the vice president’s senior staff, “The president doesn’t want him to attend” Zelensky’s inauguration, according to someone present at the meeting. He did not — a slight to a European head of state.On May 23, 2019, Charles Kupperman, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, and others discussed Ukraine with Trump in the Oval Office. Speaking to the press about the matter for the first time, Kupperman told me that the very subject of Ukraine threw the president into a rage: “He just let loose — ‘They’re [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me.’”Because Kupperman had seen how disdainfully Trump treated allies like Merkel, Macron, Theresa May of Britain and Moon Jae-in of South Korea, he knew how unlikely it was that the president could come to see the geopolitical value of Ukraine. “He felt like our allies were screwing us, and he had no sense as to why these alliances benefited us or why you need a global footprint for military and strategic capabilities,” Kupperman told me. “If one were to ask him to define ‘balance of power,’ he wouldn’t know what that concept was. He’d have no idea about the history of Ukraine and why it’s in the front pages today. He wouldn’t know that Stalin starved that country. Those are the contextual points one has to take into account in the making of foreign policy. But he wasn’t capable of it, because he had no understanding of history: how these countries and their leadership evolved, what makes these countries tick.”In July 2019, Trump ordered that a hold be placed on nearly $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine that had already been appropriated by Congress. The president stood essentially alone in his opposition to such assistance, Kupperman told me: “Everyone in the interagency process was uniformly united to release the aid. We needed to do this, there was no controversy to it, but it got held up anyway.” News of the freeze became public that September, and the White House variously claimed that the funds had been withheld because of Ukraine’s corruption and because other NATO countries should be contributing more to Ukraine. Alyssa Farah Griffin, then the Pentagon press secretary, recalled to me that she asked Laura Cooper, the Department of Defense deputy assistant secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, whether the hold was part of the standard review process.“Absolutely not,” Cooper replied to her. “Nothing about this is normal.”A few days later, the Trump White House released a reconstructed transcript of the president’s July 25 phone conversation with Zelensky. In it, Trump responded to the Ukrainian leader’s interest in purchasing Javelin missiles by saying: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike” — a reference to the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate its 2016 email security breach, which became a facet of Giuliani’s hallucinatory claim that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that stole the emails. In the same conversation, Trump requested that Zelensky help Giuliani investigate “Biden’s son,” referring to Hunter Biden, and ominously said of his recently fired ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, that “she’s going to go through some things.”“My first reaction to it,” Farah Griffin told me in speaking about the phone call for the first time publicly, “was that it was wildly inappropriate to be bringing up domestic political concerns, and it seemed to border on the conspiratorial. I’d been around for a lot of head-of-state meetings and calls, and they’re pretty pro forma. You know the things that you’re not supposed to say. It seemed like such a bizarre breach of diplomacy.” She went on: “But then, once it became clear that the Office of Management and Budget had actually blocked the money prior to the conversation, I thought: Wow. This is bad.”Fiona Hill and most of the others who testified in 2019 during Trump’s first impeachment hearings were unknown to ordinary Americans — and, for that matter, to Trump himself, who protested on Twitter that his accusers were essentially nobodies. It was their fidelity to their specialized labors that made them such effective witnesses. “One benefit to our investigation,” said Daniel Goldman, who served as the lead majority counsel to the House impeachment inquiry, “was that these were for the most part career public servants who took extensive contemporaneous notes every day. As a result, we received very detailed testimony that helped us figure out what happened.”Hill being sworn in as a witness during impeachment-inquiry hearings in November 2019.Al Drago/Bloomberg, via Getty ImagesIn reality, however, what happened in the Ukraine episode was not evident to much of the public. Trump prevailed in his impeachment trial, seeming to emerge from the ordeal without a political scratch. This, his former national security adviser John Bolton told me, distinguished the inquiry from the investigation into the conduct of President Richard Nixon 45 years earlier, which resulted in Nixon’s fellow Republicans deserting him. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump in his first impeachment trial “clearly did embolden him,” Bolton said. “This is Trump saying, ‘I got away with it.’ And thinking, If I got away with it once, I can get away with it again. And he did get away with it again.” (Bolton did not testify before the House committee; at the time, his lawyer said he was “not willing to appear voluntarily.”)Hill, for her part, emerged from the events of 2019 rather dazed by her sudden fame — but just as much so, she told me, by the implications of what she and other White House colleagues had experienced that culminated in Trump’s impeachment. “In real time, I was putting things together,” she said. “The domestic political errands, the way Trump had privatized foreign policy for his own purposes. It was this narrow goal: his desire to stay in power, irrespective of what other people wanted.”Hill was at her desk at home on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, writing her memoir, when a journalist friend she first met in Russia called. The friend told her to turn on the television. Once she did so, a burst of horrific clarity overtook her. “I saw the thread,” she told me. “The thread connecting the Zelensky phone call to Jan. 6. And I remembered how, in 2020, Putin had changed Russia’s Constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. This was Trump pulling a Putin.”Alexander Vindman, who was removed from his job as N.S.C. director for European affairs months after testifying against Trump (the president, his son Don Jr. and other supporters accused Vindman, a Soviet émigré and Army officer, of disloyalty, perjury and espionage), told me he experienced a similar epiphany in the wake of Jan. 6. Vindman was exercising at a gym in Virginia that afternoon when his wife, Rachel, called him to say that a mob had attacked the U.S. Capitol. After recovering from his stupefaction, “my first impulse was to counterprotest,” Vindman recalled. “I was thinking, What can I do to defend the Capitol? Then I realized that would be a recipe for disaster. It might give the president cause to invoke martial law.”In Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election results, Vindman told me, the president revealed himself as “incompetent, his own worst enemy, faced with too many checks in a 240-plus-year-old democracy to be able to operate with a free hand.” At the same time, he went on: “I came to see these seemingly individual events — the Ukraine scandal, the attempt to steal the 2020 election — as part of a broader tapestry. And the domestic effects of all this are bad enough. But there’s also a geopolitical impact. We missed an opportunity to harden Ukraine against Russian aggression.”Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testifying before the House Intelligence Committee during the impeachment inquiry in November 2019.David Butow/ReduxInstead, Vindman said, the opposite occurred: “Ukraine became radioactive for the duration of the Trump administration. There wasn’t serious engagement. Putin had been wanting to reclaim Ukraine for eight years, but he was trying to gauge when was the right time to do it. Starting just months after Jan. 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here. He saw the huge opportunity presented by Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys. I’m not pulling any punches here. I’m not using diplomatic niceties. These folks sent the signal Putin was waiting for.”Bolton, a renowned foreign-policy hawk who also served in the administrations of Reagan and George W. Bush, also told me that Trump’s behavior had dealt damage to both Ukraine and America. The refusal to lend aid to Ukraine, the subsequent disclosure of the heavy-handed conversation with Zelensky and then the impeachment hearing all served to undermine Ukraine’s new president, Bolton told me. “It made it impossible for Zelensky to establish any kind of relationship with the president of the United States — who, faced with a Russian Army on his eastern border, any Ukrainian president would have as his highest priority. So basically that means Ukraine loses a year and a half of contact with the president.”Trump, Bolton went on to say, “is a complete aberration in the American system. We’ve had good and bad presidents, competent and incompetent presidents. But none of them was as centered on their own interest, as opposed to the national interest, except Trump. And his concept of what the national interest was really changed from day to day and had a lot more to do with what his political fortunes were.” This was certainly the case with Trump’s view of Ukraine, which, Bolton said, describing fantasies that preoccupied the president, “he saw entirely through the prism of Hillary Clinton’s server and Hunter Biden’s income — what role Ukraine had in Hillary’s efforts to steal the 2016 election and what role Ukraine had in Biden’s efforts to steal the 2020 election.”Bolton acknowledged to me that he found Trump’s conduct both in the Ukraine scandal and on Jan. 6 to be arguably worthy of impeachment. Still, he offered a rather tangled assessment of the two processes — finding fault with Democrats in the first inquiry for “trying to ram it through quickly” and, in the second impeachment, for not pressing quickly enough and “trying him before January the 20th.”But Bolton seems to regard the former president’s abuses of power as validation of America’s institutional strengths rather than a warning sign. “I think he did damage to the United States before and because of January the 6th,” Bolton told me. “I don’t think there’s any question about that. But I think all that damage was reparable. I think that constitutions are written with human beings involved, and occasionally you get bad actors. This was a particularly bad actor. So with all the stress and strain on the Constitution, it held up pretty well.”When I asked whether he believed Trump could be viewed as an authoritarian, Bolton replied, “He’s not smart enough to be an authoritarian.” But had Donald Trump won in 2020, Bolton told me, in his second term he might well have inflicted “damage that might not be reparable.” I asked whether his same concerns would apply if Trump were to gain another term in 2024, and Bolton answered with one word: “Yes.”At the moment, Trump’s chances of victory are favorable. He remains the putative lead candidate for the G.O.P.’s nomination and would most likely face an 81-year-old incumbent whose approval ratings are underwater. Even in defeat, there is little reason to believe that Trump will concede at all, much less do so gracefully. This January, President Biden said: “I know the majority of the world leaders — the good and the bad ones, adversaries and allies alike. They’re watching American democracy and seeing whether we can meet this moment.” Biden went on to say that at the G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, the previous summer, his assurances that America was back were met by his foreign counterparts with the response, “For how long?”One former foreign-policy official who played a role in the Trump-Ukraine tensions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the former president, was unsettled but also unsurprised by Biden’s account. “In the back of their minds,” this former official said of America’s allies, “if Trump is elected again in 2024, where will we be? I think it would be seen among struggling democracies as a disaster. They would see Trump as someone who went through two impeachment inquiries, orchestrated a conspiracy to undo a failed election and then, somehow, is re-elected. They would see it as Trump truly unbound. But to them, it would also say something about us and our values.”Hill agreed with that assessment when I described it to her. “We’ve been the gold standard of democratic elections,” she told me. “All of that will be rolled back if Trump returns to power after claiming that the only way he could ever lose is if someone steals it from him. It’ll be more than diplomatic shock. I think it would mean the total loss of America’s leadership position in the world arena.”A couple of months ago, Hill told me, she attended a book event in Louisville, Ky. Onstage with her was another recent author, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who was the House Democrats’ lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Raskin, who happens to be Hill’s congressman, had also been among the managers in the first trial.Their event took place on Jan. 24, exactly one month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though Putin’s troops had been massed along the border for several months, speculation of war was not a public preoccupation. For the moment, Hill’s expertise was in lesser demand than that of Raskin, who is now a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. For much of their hourlong colloquy, it was Hill who asked searching questions of Raskin — who, she told me, “was deeply disturbed by how close we came to basically not having a transfer of power.”At one point, Hill acknowledged to Raskin and the live audience that she had been thinking lately of the “Hamilton” song “You’ll Be Back,” crooned maliciously by King George to his American subjects. “I have been worried over whether we might be back to that kind of period,” she said. Hill went on to describe the United States as being in a state of de-evolution, with the checks on executive power flagging and the concept of governmental experience regarded with scorn rather than admiration.What she did not say then was something that Hill has told me more than once since that time. Throughout all our changes, presidents and senior staff in government, she said: “Putin has been there for 22 years. He’s the same guy, with the same people around him. And he’s watching everything.”Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. More

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      With a Neutral Stance on Ukraine, Viktor Orban Pulled in Voters

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      BUDAPEST — Savoring the election victory of a rare European leader who has not condemned him as a war criminal, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday congratulated Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for winning a fourth term and said he looked forward to an expansion of “partnership ties.”At a time when Russia’s relations with the European Union and the United States are unraveling over the war in Ukraine, Hungary, a member of the European bloc, has mostly sat on the fence in response to the Russian invasion, in part to avoid upsetting a natural gas deal cemented by Mr. Orban during talks with Mr. Putin in Moscow shortly before Russia invaded.A thumping victory in Sunday’s election for Mr. Orban’s party, Fidesz, suggested that the Hungarian leader would stick with a policy strongly endorsed by voters.But following a vote that independent election observers said was unfairly tilted in the governing party’s favor, there is also growing pressure on Mr. Orban to change course or risk not only alienating Hungary’s allies but losing billions of dollars in badly needed funding from the European Union for failing to uphold the rule of law.Guy Verhofstadt, a prominent liberal in the European Parliament, described the election as “a dark day for liberal democracy, for Hungary and the E.U., at a perilous time.”Mr. Putin got more mixed news from elections Sunday in Serbia, where Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s populist pro-Russia president, won re-election, according to preliminary official results issued on Monday. But it looked as if President Vucic could lose his increasingly authoritarian grip on power after his governing party failed to win a clear majority in Parliament.The Kremlin congratulated Mr. Vucic nonetheless, calling for a strengthening of what it described as a “strategic partnership” in the interests of “brotherly Russian and Serb people.”Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s pro-Russia president, won re-election on Sunday, but could lose his grip on power after his governing party failed to win a clear majority in Parliament.Andrej Cukic/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Orban’s Fidesz party has been divided over how to respond to Russia’s aggression, with its more traditional nationalist wing, steeped in the history of Hungary’s own past suffering at Russia’s hands, uncomfortable with cozying up to Mr. Putin.But its hopes that Mr. Orban, who went from being an anti-Kremlin liberal firebrand in 1989 to Mr. Putin’s closest partner in Europe, might again change direction after the election seems to have been diminished by the scale of his party’s victory. It won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament while an openly pro-Putin, far-right party, Our Homeland Movement, secured enough votes to enter Parliament for the first time.“Putin is right. Ukraine is getting what it deserves,” Janos Horvath, a supporter of the far-right party, said after casting his vote. Ukraine, he said, echoing a favorite Kremlin talking point, mistreats its ethnic minorities, including Russians and Hungarians, and “must be stopped.”The crushing defeat of Mr. Orban’s opponents, who campaigned on pledges to show more solidarity with Ukraine and Hungary’s allies, makes it unlikely that Hungary will now join NATO and the European Union in condemning Mr. Putin over his military onslaught or in supplying weapons to help Ukraine defend itself. Hungary, unlike Poland, has steadfastly refused to let weapons pass through its territory to Ukraine.While increasingly isolated from his foreign allies, Mr. Orban won strong domestic support for his neutral stance on the war, turning what had initially threatened to become an electoral liability into a vote-getter. He did this through relentless misrepresentation of his opponents’ position, deploying a vast apparatus of loyal media outlets to convince voters that his rivals wanted to send Hungarian troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia, something that nobody has suggested doing.Supporters of Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party on Sunday.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesAt the opposition’s final rally in Budapest on election eve, Fidesz activists masquerading as journalists presented the opposition’s main candidate, Peter Maki Zay, with a white T-shirt emblazoned with a red target, shouting that this was what Hungary would become if he won. A video of the encounter was later posted online by Fidesz-friendly media outlets, which repeatedly cast the election as a choice between “war and peace.”Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Russian atrocities. More

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      With Ukraine Invasion, Hungary’s Leader Softens His Embrace of Russia

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      Facing an election on Sunday, Viktor Orban plays neutral peacemaker while campaigning against the “gender insanity” that he says is creeping in from the West.DEBRECEN, Hungary — The towering memorial, erected on the battlefield where the Russian imperial army routed Hungarian troops, mourns Russia’s 1849 victory over “brave homeland defenders.” It is a reminder of how, for centuries, the Hungarian psyche has been shaped and scarred by the specter of Russian domination.“There has been a constant fear of Russia,” said Gyorgy Miru, a history professor in Debrecen, a Hungarian city near the border with Ukraine where the battle took place.Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, however, this fear has turned into a trusting embrace. Mr. Orban, a political bruiser who revels in defying what he scorns as liberal conventions, has for years looked to Russia as a reliable source of energy and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, as a beacon of no-nonsense nationalism and muscular leadership, emulating in a milder form the Kremlin’s stranglehold on media and its one-party system.Amid the agonies inflicted on neighboring Ukraine over the past five weeks by Moscow, Mr. Orban’s stance has left many in Hungary and beyond dismayed and angry that a nation with such a long and painful experience of Russian aggression could fall so far out of step with the rest of Europe.Facing an election on Sunday against an unusually united opposition, Mr. Orban has cast himself as a neutral peacemaker who does not want to fan the war by sending weapons to Ukraine or to hurt Hungarian interests by imposing a ban on Russian oil imports.“As a historian, I am surprised and shocked,” Professor Miru said, recalling that Russian troops not only crushed Hungary’s 1848-49 revolt against imperial rule by Austria but also an anti-communist rebellion in 1956.The memorial in Debrecen remembering Hungarians killed by Russian troops in 1849.The New York TimesIn a speech in Budapest on March 15, a national holiday to mark the start of the 1848 revolt, Mr. Orban turned what is usually a solemn occasion into an election rally featuring a call to arms against liberal values and Western solidarity against Russia over Ukraine.He vowed to “stop at Hungary’s border the gender insanity sweeping across the Western world” and to protect Hungarian national interests against the competing interests of Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union. “We must represent our own interests, calmly and bravely,” he said, without mentioning Russia’s invasion.Mr. Orban has hardly applauded Russia’s military onslaught, which his government describes as “aggression.” But neither has he criticized Mr. Putin nor joined Poland, Britain, Germany and other European countries in helping Ukraine defend itself.Irpin, Ukraine, on Friday. Previous weeks of fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces has damaged the city, which is northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesHis opposition to a ban on Russian oil has infuriated Poland, whose conservative governing party previously stood shoulder to shoulder with Hungary in Europe’s culture wars. It was enough to lead the Czech defense minister, Jana Cernochova, to declare last week that she was “very sorry that cheap Russian oil is now more important to Hungarian politicians than Ukrainian blood.”The Czech minister canceled a trip to Hungary for a planned gathering of the Visegrad Group, comprising four previously close Central European states. Poland and Slovakia, the other scheduled attendees, also stayed away.The leader of Poland’s governing party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Mr. Orban’s closest ally in the European Union, has tried to calm the rift, but even he has expressed dismay at Hungary’s fence-sitting on the war in Ukraine. “We view Hungary’s attitude with criticism, and we hope that it will become more involved,” Mr. Kaczynski told a conservative Polish weekly.Suspicion of Hungary over its ties to Moscow is so intense that some now see Mr. Orban’s nation, a member of NATO since 1999, as a weak link in the alliance.An exercise with NATO special forces troops in 2019 in Hungary. Some now consider Hungary a weak link in the alliance. The New York TimesAsked about Hungary’s hesitant support for Ukraine, Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian foreign minister, lamented that “unwavering trust in some of our allies could be an unfortunate victim of Russia’s war against Ukraine.”Instead of rallying to help Ukraine, Mr. Orban has gone on the offensive against it, claiming on Friday that it had “made a pact” with his election rivals. This followed an earlier claim by his foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, that the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, recently called Ukraine’s ambassador in Budapest to “consult on the possibility of influencing the election results in Hungary” in cahoots with the opposition. Mr. Kuleba responded by accusing his Hungarian counterpart of “inventing nonsense” for “short-term benefit before the elections” and “destroying the long-term relationship between us.”Mr. Orban, hailed as a hero by many American conservatives, has taken broad steps in recent years to use his power to erode democratic norms, but his moves to revise election laws to benefit his party and mute critical voices in the media have been especially notable as the vote nears on Sunday. Opinion polls suggest Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party will again win, though it may fall short of the two-thirds majority in Parliament that had allowed Mr. Orban to rewrite the Constitution and turn Hungary into a semi-autocratic state.At a closed-door meeting on Thursday in Slovakia of nine regional foreign ministers, Mr. Szijjarto complained irritably that Hungary had been misunderstood and denied it was siding with Russia, according to a minister who was present.Seeking to rally Mr. Orban’s base ahead of the election, Mr. Szijjarto traveled the previous day to Debrecen and visited a campaign office for the Fidesz party. Asked as he was leaving whether Hungary’s policy toward Russia had left his country isolated, he shouted, “No, no, no,” and rushed out of the building to a waiting limousine.Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, center, on Wednesday in Debrecen.The New York TimesFamous across Hungary as the place where anti-imperial rebels issued Hungary’s declaration of independence in 1849, Debrecen has long been associated with Hungarian nationalism. The city, said Robert Hermann, a leading Hungarian scholar of the 1848 revolution, “is our Philadelphia,” a reference to the city where rebellious American colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776.Hungary, he added, was never as passionately hostile to Russia as Poland was, in part because Russian troops who fought in Debrecen and other rebel strongholds in the 19th century tended to treat Hungarian captives relatively well. But wariness of Moscow, amplified by its brutal crushing of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, he said, still runs deep, particularly on the right.Under Mr. Orban, however, “distrust of Russia on the right went into the background,” Mr. Hermann said, as Fidesz, despite its strongly nationalist tinge, embraced a view of Russia that had previously been confined to the left. Describing himself as a “liberal nationalist,” Mr. Hermann said he had been “very confused” by Mr. Orban’s sharp tilt toward Moscow after he took power in 2010.Also confused has been Debrecen University, which in 2017 awarded Mr. Putin the title of “honorary citizen” as part of Hungary’s courtship of the Kremlin. A week after he invaded Ukraine, it issued a statement that avoided criticizing the Russian leader but subtly declared his title void, since he had not visited in person to collect it.Ukrainian refugees on Thursday at a shelter in Budapest.The New York TimesDespite first making his name as an anti-Moscow firebrand who in 1989 demanded that 80,000 Soviet troops then in Hungary go home, Mr. Orban has repeatedly spoken in recent years of the need to get along with Mr. Putin. In an interview with an Italian newspaper in 2018, he acknowledged that “in the past, we Hungarians have suffered a lot under Russia.” But he added that “it needs to be recognized that Putin has made his country great again” and that he should not be viewed as a devil “with hooves and horns” but as a leader who “rules a great and ancient empire.”Mr. Orban’s outreach to Mr. Putin has been driven in part by close cooperation on energy. Russia lent Hungary $10 billion to finance the construction of a nuclear power plant by a Russian company and provided it with natural gas at favorable prices. But there has also been a political dimension, with Mr. Orban looking to Moscow as an ally in the struggle against progressive ideas seeping in from Western Europe. Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Orban has often spoken about what he sees as the threat posed by gay men, lesbians and transgender people and their advocates.Supporters of Mr. Orban in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, on Friday during the rally.The New York TimesWhile Poland has been plastered in recent weeks with Ukrainian flags and other signs of solidarity with its eastern neighbor, streets across Hungary have been decked with placards trumpeting the need to “protect our children.” Alongside a vote on Sunday for Parliament, Hungarians are also being asked to vote on a series of inflammatory questions, like, “Do you support the promotion of sex reassignment therapy for underage children?”In early February, as fears mounted of a coming Russian invasion of Ukraine and European leaders warned of severe sanctions if an attack occurred, Mr. Orban visited Moscow to cement his country’s energy ties with Russia. For his efforts, he secured a promise from Mr. Putin that Hungary, unlike other European countries, had no need to worry about running short of natural gas.Mr. Orban described Mr. Putin’s security demands as “normal” and sanctions as pointless. The Russian president returned the favor, telling Mr. Orban that while Russia did not usually take sides in foreign elections: “You have done so much in your work on the Russia track, both in the interest of Hungary and Russia. I hope our cooperation will continue.”After Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Hungary joined fellow members of the European Union in imposing sanctions on Moscow, but it has since refused to let weapons destined for Ukraine pass through its territory and resisted efforts to impose restrictions on Russian energy imports.With television stations and many print outlets controlled directly by the state or by government-friendly tycoons, Hungary’s governing party, Fidesz, has shifted its nationalist base away from its traditional fear of Russia toward the belief that Mr. Putin stands on the same side of the barricades in defending traditional values.Outside the House of Terror, a museum in Budapest focusing on the fascist and communist governments in 20th-century Hungary. The museum is also a memorial to the victims.The New York Times“Thanks to Orban’s media, Putin is now more popular in this segment of the population than the American president or the German chancellor,” said Zoltan Biro, a Russia expert at the Corvinus University in Budapest.Speaking outside the Fidesz election headquarters in Debrecen this past week, Tibor Tisza, a taxi company owner and enthusiastic party supporter, said he had visited the local memorial to Hungarians killed by Russian troops in 1849. But he said he felt no ill will toward Russia because it “finally has a real, powerful and patriotic leader” who battles to protect children and national interests just as Mr. Orban does.Mr. Tisza said he regretted the bloodshed in Ukraine but, echoing a theme regularly promoted by Fidesz-friendly news media outlets, accused Kyiv of harboring Nazis and restricting the rights of both ethnic Russians and ethnic Hungarians to live in peace.He added that he was not against Ukraine but did not want Hungary to get sucked into its war with Russia. “If my neighbor’s house is on fire,” Mr. Tisza, “should I set my own house on fire, too?”Tomas Dapkus More