Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Europe will be left on its own to handle the war in Ukraine if it does not ditch its pro-war stance.
In his address at the Bálványos Summer University in Băile Tuşnad, Romania, the prime minister said the “pro-peace position” was “fermenting”. Many people in Brussels, however, had condemned Hungary’s peace mission, even though the bloc’s founding treaty stated that “the Union’s aim is to promote peace”. PM Orbán said: “Time is on the side of the politics of peace.” Referring to the upcoming US presidential election, he declared: “Trump ante portas.” If Europe did not shift to a “peace policy” by the time of the November election, it would have to do so after Trump’s victory, “admitting defeat” and bearing the political consequences alone. Brussels “doesn’t like it when we call what they do a pro-war policy, because they think they’re supporting the war in the interest of peace.” Since the start of Hungary’s “peace mission”, however, the US secretary of state had spoken with Russia’s foreign minister, and the Swiss foreign minister had also held talks with him. Volodymyr Zelensky had called Donald Trump and the Ukrainian foreign minister had visited Beijing, he said. “We’re moving away from a European pro-war policy in the direction of a pro-peace policy.”
The prime minister said that if it were up to Ukraine and Russia, there would never be peace, so peace can only come from the outside. Both sides, he added, were taking “brutal” losses, “yet neither wants to reach a settlement”. He said this was because both Ukraine and Russia believed that they could win and were fuelled by their own “perceived or real truth”. Orbán said the Ukrainians saw the war as a Russian invasion that violated international law and their territorial sovereignty, and that they were defending themselves and fighting a war of independence. The Russians, on the other hand, believed that there had been “serious NATO military developments in Ukraine”, that the country had been promised NATO membership, and they did not want to see either the alliance’s troops or weapons on the Russia-Ukraine border, he said. Russia therefore believed it had a right to self-defence and that the war had been provoked. “So everyone has some kind of perceived or real truth, and neither side will give up the war,” he said. “This is a straight path to escalation,” he said, stressing that there would be no peace if it were left up to the two warring sides. “Peace can only come from the outside,” Orbán said. He said that while in recent years the US had declared China to be its main challenger and opponent, “we’re still seeing that it’s fighting a proxy war against Russia and constantly accusing China of covertly supporting Russia.” “If that’s true, then it begs the question as to why it’s rational to put two such large countries in the same enemy camp,” he said. Orbán also emphasised Ukraine’s defiance of expectations in terms of its resilience, which he attributed to Ukraine getting “a flash of the perspective of belonging to the West” instead of being a buffer state. Meanwhile, the prime minister said Russia “isn’t the firm neo-Stalinist autocracy the Brussels leaders trying to bring it to its knees with sanctions are trying to make it out to be, either”. Rather, he said, it was a country that was showing technical and economic, “and eventually, perhaps, social” flexibility.