After an informal meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Prague on Friday, Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said that “some statements showing a total lack of sober judgment” had been made. Still, the government will not allow Hungary “to be sucked into NATO’s war madness”.
Minister Szijjártó told a press conference that “the war express has pulled out of the penultimate station” and it is questionable if there was still a chance to stop it. “I think there is only one emergency brake left that we can rely on, which is the June 9 EP election, in which European people, among them Hungarian voters, can make it clear to their governments that they do not want to live in a war in Europe in the long term,” he said. Minister Szijjártó said the atmosphere of the meeting had been “as if we were in the last phases of preparation for war”. He said several “dangerous proposals” had been made, for instance, that the Ukrainian army could aim US weapons at Russian targets, and western experts would be dispatched to Ukraine for training soldiers. “We believe that with all these proposals and ideas, NATO will make more, and increasingly large steps in the direction of getting involved in the war, whereas two and a half years ago we decided together that NATO must not be part of the war,” he said.