Hungary’s Orban marches to own beat, dismaying some in EU. His Putin meeting is latest move

This week may prove pivotal in the two-and-a-half year war started when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

A day after Hungary took over the rotating six-month position as head of the Council of the European Union, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and later in the week visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.  

The Washington Post wrote that “Though the rotating presidency [of the E.U.] yields little power, it gives Orban and his government a platform – one he could use to amplify the views of Europe’s ascendant far right and potentially undermine Ukraine’s call for more support.”

“I told [Zelensky] that his initiatives require a lot of time due to international diplomatic rules,” Orban said Tuesday, according to The Post. He said that he asked Zelensky “to consider whether it might be possible to do things a bit differently — to stop the fire and then negotiate with Russia, as a cease-fire would speed up the pace of these negotiations.”

But for now, at least, the consensus of the EU and the U.S. is to allow Zelensky to set the terms that would need to be met before agreeing to a ceasefire.

He has set forth a 10-point peace plan that does not envision a cessation of hostilities while Russian troops are still occupying Ukraine. The argument is that such an agreement could give Russia the chance to rearm and continue their efforts at seizing Ukrainian territory.

Orban’s trip to Russia brought charges that he is more of an ally to Putin than a representative voice of the EU and NATO.

Following his visit to Moscow, Orban tweeted that “I have concluded my talks in #Moscow with President Putin. My goal was to open the channels of direct communication and start a dialogue on the shortest road to #peace. Mission accomplished! To be continued on Monday."

Previously he had tweeted, “You cannot make peace from a comfortable armchair in Brussels. Even if the rotating EU-Presidency has no mandate to negotiate on behalf of the EU, we cannot sit back and wait for the war to miraculously end. We will serve as an important tool in making the first steps towards #peace. This is what our peace mission is about.”

After his meeting with Zelensky, Orban said he told him that his initiatives "require a lot of time due to international diplomatic rules.”

Orban also said he asked Zelensky “to consider whether it might be possible to do things a bit differently – to stop the fire and then negotiate with Russia, as a cease-fire would speed up the pace of these negotiations.”

According to Bloomberg News, “The Russian leader reinforced Russia’s position on a possible settlement that he set forth in a speech last month to the Russian Foreign Ministry in which he demanded Kyiv withdraw its forces from four regions partially occupied by his troops and abandon its goal of joining NATO.”

Orban laid out his historical view of the situation in an opinion piece for Newsweek, including the reason Hungary decided to become part of NATO in 1999, less than a decade after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“When the Hungarian nation joined NATO it had not been a voluntary member of a military alliance for a long time – perhaps as long as five hundred years. The importance of this circumstance cannot be overemphasized,” he wrote.

“In addition to our natural desire to free ourselves from Soviet domination and to join the West, a special factor made NATO attractive to us: we were finally joining a military alliance that was committed not to waging war but to keeping the peace, not to offensive expansion but to the defense of ourselves and one another. From a Hungarian perspective we could not have wished for anything better.”

The concern about a ceasefire appears largely that Russia would be able to gain control of parts of Ukraine, which would encourage it to take over other countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. 

However, Ukraine, even with the nearly $200 billion that the West has sent or committed in military and financial aid, does not appear, at least right now, to be able to defeat Russia, and even if it eventually could, the price in human loss and suffering as well as the destruction of Ukraine cities and infrastructure would be too great to bear.