BUDAPEST, Hungary — There were pink ankle booties and scuffed sneakers, sensible pumps and leather loafers, a pair of child-sized yellow-rubber rain boots — all laid out on the east bank of the River Danube, in the heart of the Hungarian capital.
The hastily assembled display last month was a tribute to the war dead of Ukraine. It was also a deliberate echo of a permanent memorial nearby, where a row of cast-iron shoes embedded in the riverbank's paving stones commemorates thousands of people, many of them Jews, who were forced to take off their footwear before being shot by a fascist Hungarian militia in the 1940s.
The modern-day shoe assortment carried another potent meaning too. It represented a rebuke of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, longtime friend to Russian President Vladimir Putin, now newly emboldened by a crushing election victory.
