Donnacha Ó Beacháin

It's always hard to get, by the way, an accurate sense of what Russians are thinking because, you know, you can't carry out normal opinion polls.

I mean, you can't stop somebody in the street or call them up via telephone and say, do you think

the war in Ukraine is a good idea.

Do you think Vladimir Putin's doing a good job?

There's not sufficient trust there for people to give their honest answers.

So we rely on different barometers, which, you know, and one interesting one for me, I mentioned briefly already, Evgeny Progozhin's rebellion of 2023, a remarkable

time, what struck me in my abiding memory is that he managed to conquer, or not even conquer, take Rostov-on-Don, one of the top 10 cities in Russia, without a fight.

This was the headquarters of Russia's military operation for fighting in Ukraine.

And then he marched 800 kilometers through Russia in a single day without resistance.

So it was like the whole Russian nation was sitting on the couch waiting to see how things would pan out.

They didn't seem to feel they had a vested interest in taking a side.

And Putin must know that when he goes to bed at night, that he doesn't have that affection, that loyalty, that people ultimately, if a more powerful person can dislodge him, people will more or less accept that as the new reality and acquiesce to it.

Yeah, I mean, obviously it was the result that we were hoping for in a two-horse race.

Nobody, I think, in democratic Europe wanted to see Viktor Orban returned for another term.

But I wouldn't be as optimistic and euphoric as many of the commentators and political leaders have been.

I mean, Peter Magyar is not a liberal opposition figure in the traditional sense.

He joined Fidesz, Orban's party, when he was 21.

He has spent his entire adult life a member of Fidesz.

He left it only two years ago.

So his political maturity was very much and loyalty and he thrived in Fidesz.