Image source, translator
- author, Nick Thorpe
- role, BBC Budapest correspondent
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has no peace plan of his own, but in the past two weeks he has made whirlwind visits to Kiev, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington and even Mar-a-Lago, infuriating EU and US leaders.
“Peace will not come naturally in a war between Russia and Ukraine, someone has to make it,” he argues in a video he posts daily on his Facebook page.
He has been heavily criticised by both Brussels and Washington for undermining EU and NATO cohesion and cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Few would dispute his central argument that there can be no peace without peacemakers, but his close economic ties with the Russian president mean he could be accused of acting as a puppet for Mr Putin.
Hungary’s right-wing prime minister says a ceasefire with a specific deadline would be a start.
“I’m not negotiating for anyone,” he told Hungarian radio during a brief stop in Budapest between visits to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kiev and Putin in Moscow.
Image source, Yuri Kochetkov/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock
For the next six months, Hungary will hold the rotating presidency of the European Union.
Orban’s visit to Kiev, the first since the start of the war, was the first by an EU leader to visit Russia since April 2022. The Kremlin visit clearly angered European partners.
Charles Michel, president of the European Council, which represents the EU’s 27 member states’ governments, said the rotating presidency had no mandate to negotiate with Russia on behalf of the EU.
Orbán acknowledged that this was true, but insisted: “I am stating the facts… I am just asking questions.”
In Kiev, he gave President Zelensky “three or four” points to understand “his intentions, where the red lines are, where the boundaries of how far he is willing to go for peace.”
He has also lavished praise on two other allies, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Meeting with Erdogan upon his arrival at the NATO summit in Washington, the president described Erdogan as “the only person who has ever overseen an agreement between Russia and Ukraine,” referring to the now-void Black Sea grain deal.
Image source, Maxim Marsenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“China is not only peace-loving, but has also put forward a series of constructive and important initiatives. [for resolving the war]”He is a great man,” he said of President Xi Jinping, according to Chinese state media.
The final stop on Trump’s whirlwind tour was with presidential candidate Donald Trump, another close aide who is a strong supporter of Trump’s reelection in November, whom he has called a “man of peace.”
In an interview, he asserted that during President Trump’s four-year term in office, “he never started a war.”
It was a remarkable trip in international attention for the leader of a tiny eastern European nation of 9.7 million people – but who was it designed to impress, and whether it would have any effect?
The main target of his message is the domestic public.
It’s been a relatively bad year so far for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who saw the scandal-hit deaths of two of his party’s most prominent female politicians in February and the emergence of his first serious challenger in more than a decade, Péter Magyar.
In June’s European Parliament elections, Orban’s Fidesz party won an impressive 45% of the vote, while Magyar’s Tisza party, founded only three months ago, managed just 30%.
However, compared to the previous parliamentary elections in 2022, the number of votes fell by more than 700,000 (a quarter).
For the first time, he no longer seemed invincible.
What better way to show the Hungarian people that their leader is still strong than to march across the world stage on a “peace-making” world tour?
His mission is also directed at the international community, where this week his new group in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe (PfE), brought together 84 MEPs from 11 countries, mostly from far-right parties.
European Patriots became the third largest group in parliament, beating out the conservative and reformist group led by their Italian rival Giorgia Meloni.
Orban’s visit to Moscow drew glowing praise from Russians: “We view it very positively, we believe it will be very beneficial,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The US was less impressed.
“Of course, we welcome actual diplomacy with Russia to make clear to Russia that it needs to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. “But this visit does not appear to have been that kind of diplomacy.”
At the same time, the United States welcomed Orban’s first visit to neighboring Ukraine since Russia began its full-scale invasion.
The Hungarian leader has revealed little about the actual content of the talks in Kiev, Moscow and Beijing.
The leaked letter sent to Charles Michel from Azerbaijan contains some clues.
Orban told the European Council president that Putin was ready to agree to a ceasefire as long as he did not give Ukraine a chance to regroup on the front line.
Three days earlier, on July 2, in Kiev, the Ukrainian president made a similar argument, telling Orban that Russia would abuse the ceasefire to regroup its invading forces.
Orban seemed “surprised” that President Zelensky still believed Ukraine could regain its lost territory.
According to the leaked letter, President Vladimir Putin told Orban that “time is in the Russian military’s favor.”
Arriving in Washington a few days later, Orban posted yet another video on Facebook in which he said he argued that NATO “should return to its original spirit. NATO should win peace, not wars around it.”
Unlike its NATO allies, President Viktor Orban sees Russia’s 2 1/2-year-old war in Ukraine as a civil war between two Slavic nations, prolonged by U.S. support for one of them.
One thing he would likely agree with is that the conflict is likely to get worse this fall.
He believes a Trump victory in November would bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table.
