The foreign minister has hailed as a success last week’s meeting between Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying it had triggered a wave of dialogue on the situation in Ukraine between Russia and the West.
Following an online foreign ministerial conference of the OSCE, Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, noted that French President Emmanuel Macron and Putin had consulted for five hours on Monday. He also said that the British foreign and defense secretaries would visit Moscow in the days to come, and the German chancellor next week. “We are happy to see that the prime minister’s ice-breaking mission proved to be a success, with European leaders appearing one after the other in the Kremlin,” he said. Minister Szijjártó expressed support for the renewed European security dialogue initiated by the Polish OSCE presidency, saying the current tension could only be eased through a dialogue. Hungary as a central European nation has a vested interest in East-West cooperation instead of a return to the Cold War psyche which caused a great deal of suffering to the region, he said. Szijjártó asked the global political players “to continue their civilised dialogue based on mutual respect and refrain from hasty decisions whose brunt would be borne by the population of central Europe”.
Photo credit: Facebook/Szijjártó Péter