Zsolt Nemeth, the head of the Hungarian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said the world order of the future will “chiefly be based on the international community’s approach to Russia.”
Speaking at the “Tusványos” Summer University in Băile Tușnad, Romania, on Wednesday, Németh said the existing world order was based on the Charter of the United Nations adopted in 1945 whose fundamental legal principles include the equality of sovereign nations, the maintenance of international peace and security, the strengthening of prosperity and the guarantee of human rights, including minority rights. “But this structure is beginning to crack because Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is riding roughshod over the principles enshrined in the UN Charter,” he said. “If it punishes Russia, then there is no more UN, but if it doesn’t, then it goes against its own fundamental principle,” he insisted. Hungary has “consistently condemned” Russia’s aggression and has recognized Ukraine’s right to defend itself, he said. In that spirit, Hungary provides help to Ukraine not through arms deliveries but by supplying fuel and with the training of military health professionals, he said. He added that the war could not be used as an excuse to discriminate against national minorities living in Ukraine. Ukraine should know that its path to the West leads through central Europe, he said. Németh said Hungary needed to find a balance between political communication and its strategic goals, and hailed Hungary’s diplomatic success in influencing Brussels’s sanctions policy to limit the negative impact of the sanctions on the country. But when it came to the perception of Hungary, he said the country had backed ten sanctions packages, yet Brussels was giving the impression that it had vetoed all of them. Meanwhile, Németh said the NATO policy agreed on at last week’s summit in Vilnius that Russia was a threat and that Ukraine’s accession to the alliance was conditional on the war ending was in line with Hungary’s position.