I'm John Batchel. It's a great pleasure to welcome my colleague and friend Yvonne Estrada

of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,

who for many years now has guided me to understand how information warfare is in the arsenal of our adversaries.

It is not treated with comparable reverence here in the United States and in Europe.

We understand media is everywhere and your choices

are your own. However, in certain cultures that are still emerging from the boot of the

Soviets, information is not everywhere and the choices are limited and one of those is

hungry. Budapest is the capital and I welcome Ivana because she is a veteran of the Danube River

Valley and the Western Balkans and can help me interpret a Financial Times report that is in

the FT out of London in these last hours, showing Victor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister standing next to

Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Foundation, both men with smiles on their faces,

and why?

Ivana, a very good evening to you.

I take you to a new book that I recommend to everybody, The Picnic, a Dream of Freedom, and the collapse

of the Iron Curtain. Remember that? Iron Curtain was a 20th century talk. That was the power

of the Soviet military, the guys with the guns, to subdue and brutalize all of what is now

understood as Eastern Europe, all of it,

including Hungary, Poland, the Baltic states, East Germany.

This is the moment when young people in Hungary, in the summer of 1989, young people in Hungary said no more.

And they said no more collectively and rejected the

Soviet model, rejected Gorbachev's Soviet Union, and chose to break through a barbed wire

fence and wander into Germany, and Austria, which were free states at the time. But I take you

...