Viktor Orbán says only Donald Trump can end Ukraine war
Hungarian prime minister calls for direct talks between US and Russia on resolving the conflict
Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, said only former US president Donald Trump could end the war in Ukraine, as he called for direct talks between the US and Russia on establishing a ceasefire.
Speaking at a panel discussion in Berlin, Orbán said US president Joe Biden had gone “too far” in calling Russian president Vladimir Putin a war criminal and saying in March that he “cannot remain in power”.
“That would make it very hard for [Biden] to make peace,” Orbán said. “This is going to sound brutal, but hope for peace goes by the name of Donald Trump.”
Orbán, who won a fourth successive election victory in April, has positioned himself as the leader of an ideology he calls “illiberal democracy”, frequently railing against immigration, globalism and gender fluidity. He has repeatedly found himself in conflict with the European Commission over what it sees as Hungary’s abuse of the rule of law.
The EU has so far refused to approve Hungary’s bid for its share of EU pandemic recovery funds over corruption and public procurement standards. Budapest has pledged a series of reforms in an effort to get the funding approved by the end of the year. Last month, EU lawmakers in Strasbourg lambasted Budapest for further backsliding on democratic values, branding the country a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”.
Other EU states, particularly in the Baltic and eastern Europe, have also taken exception to Orbán’s close relationship with Putin. Though the prime minister has consistently voted with the rest of the EU on sanctions, he has refrained from attacking Russia as harshly as other western leaders.
Orbán, who was in Berlin for talks with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, described the EU Commission’s sanctions policy as “disastrous”, saying they were being implemented in a way that “harms European interests”.
He said sanctions against Russian energy had driven up prices for oil and gas, increasing the Kremlin’s revenues. “If we had implemented them properly, prices wouldn’t be so sky high right now,” he said. “In the question of energy, we are dwarfs and the Russians are giants. A dwarf sanctions a giant and we’re all amazed when the dwarf dies.”
Orbán dismissed suggestions that he was more on Russia’s side in the war than on Ukraine’s, saying Russia’s invasion was an “act of aggression” and a clear breach of international law.
But he said the international community had failed to “isolate” the conflict, as it had succeeded in doing in 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea — an achievement he attributed to the political skills of former German chancellor Angela Merkel, describing her diplomacy at the time as a “masterstroke”.
Asked whether Merkel may have prevented Russia’s war with Ukraine if she were still chancellor, he replied: “sure”.
Orbán implied that the US had become a party to the war by supplying money and weapons to Kyiv, and the war would continue as long as Ukraine continued to receive American support. It could, for that reason, only be stopped through direct negotiations between Russia and the US, rather than between Russia and Ukraine.
“Only the Americans can bring this war to an end,” he said.
His praise of Trump is not new. Orbán and his closest advisers have often implied they hope the Republican party will return to power.
“American politics could be very different very soon, and for them Hungary is a blueprint,” said Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s chief political adviser, in a recent interview. “Hungary is no longer an outcast on the American right, and we are placing bets on their good performance in the midterms and in 2024,” he told the Financial Times.
In August, the Hungarian prime minister gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, the most influential gathering of the American right. In it, Orbán called on delegates to “unite our forces . . . because we Hungarians know how to defeat the enemies of freedom on the political battlefield”.