The Weekly Forum - 7 March
10 maart 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
The Ukraine issue continues to develop at breakneck speed but the two sides in the argument are speaking different languages. On the ‘pro-Ukraine’ side (in reality, pro-globalist) there is the language of ‘morality,’ World War II, Hitler, appeasement and so on. These are all ideological talking points designed not to convince but to humiliate the opponent. On the ‘pro-peace’ side, realism. Realism is what FVD has called for since the beginning of the war and Ralf Dekker did so again this week in Parliament – the day before General Kellogg, Trump’s Ukraine envoy, told the Council of Foreign Relations that Russia currently has more soldiers in Ukraine than there are in the entire US army, and that the Ukrainian losses are greater than US losses in Vietnam and Korea combined. What, realistically, can Europe do against such overwhelming force except sue for peace and look to the future? And what is moral about continuing a war which has patently been lost?
Read Ralf Dekker’s speech here
However, the other side does not give up easily. In the week when the European Parliament called for Hungary’s voting rights to be suspended in the EU, three judges at the European Court of Human Rights upheld Romania’s decision to cancel last year’s presidential elections. There is a pattern here – if you don’t vote the right way, your vote will be removed. The lawfare deployed massively against Donald Trump after 2016 is now also being deployed at the international level against all dissidents on the Ukraine issue. As J. D. Vance said at Munich, the cancellation of the Romanian elections is an outrage. In an article we are honoured to republish, Stephen Marshall denounces “the ever-expanding, quasi-totalitarian rule of judges, lawyers, prosecutors, bar associations, and other legal operatives” both in Romania and across the West.
Read Stephan Marshall’s article here
And what about those who claim to have new ideas? FVD International’s Vincent Vos attended the ARC conference in London recently where various right-wing luminaries, many from the English-speaking world, presented their proposals for saving ‘Western civilisation’. But as Vincent Vos quickly realised, they were in fact just serving warmed-up liberalism – the very liberalism which has led the West into its current impasse and which Trump is trying heroically to abandon.
Read Vincent Vos’ article here
On Saturday 15 March one of our international networks, The Patriots Network, is holding an event in Amsterdam with Thierry Baudet as the speaker.
Please sign up for the event here
We had a fascinating discussion about Ukraine on The Forum this week with two Ukrainian exiles, one a former MP, the other a former diplomat and civil servant. We discussed the end of Zelensky and what the future can possibly hold for that broken country.