Budapest | Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday celebrated his country's status as the host of upcoming talks between US President Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin, a meeting where the two leaders are expected to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine.
Trump on Thursday announced his second meeting this year with Putin, a day before he was to sit down with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House. A date for the meeting has not been set, but Trump said it would take place in Hungary's capital, Budapest, and suggested it could happen in about two weeks.
Speaking to state radio on Friday, Orban, a close Trump ally and considered Putin's closest partner in the European Union, suggested that his long-standing opposition to the West supplying Ukraine with military and financial aid to assist in its defence against Russia's invasion had played a role in making Budapest the site of the talks.
“Budapest is essentially the only place in Europe today where such a meeting could be held, primarily because Hungary is almost the only pro-peace country,” Orban said. “For three years, we have been the only country that has consistently, openly, loudly, and actively advocated for peace.”
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hungary has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons or allow their transfer across its borders. Orban has threatened to veto certain EU sanctions against Moscow and held up the bloc's adoption of major EU funding packages to Kyiv.
Meanwhile, Hungary has actively resisted weaning off of Russian fossil fuels that help fund Moscow's war, and, in contrast to almost all of the EU's other 26 countries, has even increased its supplies since the 2022 invasion.
The meeting in Budapest comes after Trump failed to secure an agreement to end the war in Ukraine during an August meeting with Putin in Alaska. Falling short of his campaign pledge to quickly stop the bloodshed, Trump rolled out the red carpet for the man who started it.
Budapest, hosting the Trump-Putin meeting, holds symbolic significance: it was in the Hungarian capital in 1994 that the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia granted Ukraine assurances of sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.
Yet for many Ukrainians, the Budapest Memorandum has become a symbol of promises that carried no weight after Moscow shredded the agreement first with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then with the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Orban, who has often taken an adversarial stance against Ukraine and Zelenskyy, has consistently portrayed his position as pro-peace, while casting his European partners who favour assisting Kyiv in its defence as warmongers. Yet Orban's critics view Hungary's position as favouring the aggressor in the war and splintering European unity in the face of Russian threats.
On Friday, Orban said he'd spoken to Trump on Thursday evening and would speak directly with Putin on Friday morning. Set to face the most challenging election of his last 15 years in power in April, Orban said that while the upcoming negotiations in Budapest were “not about Hungary,” the capital's hosting of the meeting could be viewed as a personal political success.
“God knows when was the last time there was such an important diplomatic event in Hungary, where we are not simply hosts, but it is also considered a political achievement,” he said.
Hungary is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, which in 2023 issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes. As a signatory, Orban's government would be required to arrest Putin if he set foot on Hungarian soil.
But Orban said in April that his country would begin the process of withdrawing from the court after he gave red carpet treatment in Budapest to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also faced an ICC warrant on suspicion of crimes against humanity for his conduct of Israel's war in the Gaza Strip.
