Estonian PM Kallas Slams Hungary’s Orban for Shaking ‘Criminal’ Putin’s Hand as Her Husband Makes a Fortune Doing Business With Russia

It is said that hypocrisy is the last tribute that vice pays to virtue. That bit of popular wisdom does seem to apply to Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas.

The Baltic state leader is brandishing her Russophobia for the world to see, but perhaps she could start at her own home – like we will see.

Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin was an image that Kallas found ‘very, very unpleasant.’

She added it defied logic, given Budapest’s past history with Moscow, for Orban to do so.

The Hungarian leader and Putin held talks in China, on Tuesday, where Orban told Putin that ‘he had never wanted to oppose Moscow, and is trying to salvage bilateral contacts’.

Reuters reported:

“‘It was very, very unpleasant to see that’, Kallas, one of Ukraine’s staunchest defenders, told Reuters in an interview in Paris. ‘How can you shake a criminal’s hand, who has waged the war of aggression, especially coming from a country that has a history like Hungary has?’ […] ‘It is not so distant past what happened in Hungary, what the Russians did there’, Kallas said.”

Kallas is alluding to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising that was crushed by Soviet tanks of the Warsaw Pact. At least 2,600 Hungarians and 600 Soviet troops died in the fighting.

Apparently, she seems to think that this fact precludes Hungary from ever having diplomatic relations with Moscow.

Kallas decided to pass judgment in Paris, after holding talks with French President Emmanuel Macron – the nanopresident who enacted a pension reform by decree and set the security forces lose on the protesters – an enlightened democrat, for sure!

Kallas also said Ukraine’s allies must not get distracted by other conflicts, but rather redouble efforts and show they are ‘in it for the long haul’.

“The immediate priority, she said, was to “increase the cost of aggression” by adding new sanctions, urgently tackling the circumvention of existing measures and to find ways for Kyiv to use frozen assets.

“The conflict is not frozen, it is a war of attrition’, she said. ‘It’s also understandable that Russia is thinking that they can endure the pain much longer than we are enduring the pain and he’s (Putin) really playing on this’.”

Now, the world’s attention has turned away from Ukraine and other flashpoints in Europe, such as the fallout after Azerbaijan’s military operation in Nagorno-Karabakh and rising tensions in the Western Balkans.

“‘The war in Middle East, of course, takes the oxygen away from all the other discussions. This is the reality, but it doesn’t mean that we should lose our interest in these areas’, Kallas said.”

That would be just another day in the Western war against Russia, if it were not for one ‘small’ detail: the Baltic leader has just recently narrowly escaped political ruin because her husband was discovered to have ongoing business with… Russia.

You read it right.

The Prime Minister’s was under tremendous pressure since reports emerged in August that ‘her husband part-owned a logistics company that continued to do business in Russia’.

Calls for Kallas to step down were insistent, and the leader of the opposition, Urmas Reinsalu, said he did not ‘see any other option’.

The Guardian reported, back in September:

“Speaking to the Guardian this week, Kallas dismissed the scandal as political opportunism by her rivals. ‘This is a witch-hunt by the opposition. It is an excuse to waste time in parliament and obstruct our progressive agenda’, she said.

Kallas, who has led a stridently pro-Ukraine government since coming to power, has defended herself by saying her husband, Arvo Hallik, is not a public figure and that she cannot be held responsible for his business activities.

In an interview with the public broadcaster ERR, she cited similarities with a controversy over the British prime minister’s wife, Akshata Murty, who was last year found to be receiving dividends from her stake in IT services company Infosys, which was still operating in Russia.

Sunak responded to the reports by saying his wife’s business affairs were not of public interest, while a Downing Street spokesperson said neither Murty ‘nor any members of her family have any involvement in the operational decisions of the company’.”

Isn’t that lovely? Kallas thinks a head of state can’t shake Russia’s head of state’s hand – ‘disgusting!’. But she, at the same time, firmly believes that it isn’t improper for her husband to make a fortune in business with Russia – after all Rishi Sunak’s wife also does that!

Hypocrisy, thy name is Kallas.

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