- Orban’s solo peace tour angers EU, US
- Orban met with Putin, Xi, Trump
- Orban aims to boost domestic support
Hungary’s Viktor Orban has no peace proposal. Still, he has spent the past two weeks on a one-person trip to Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington, and even Mar-a-Lago, infuriating EU and US officials.
“Peace will not come by itself in the Russia-Ukraine war; someone must make it,” he declares in daily videos posted to his Facebook page.
Brussels and Washington have roundly chastised him for undermining EU and NATO unity by cozying up to Vladimir Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
Few people disagree with his primary premise: peace can only be peace with peacemakers. However, his tight business ties with Russia’s ruler leave him vulnerable to accusations of acting as Mr Putin’s puppet.
According to the right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister, a ceasefire with a specified deadline would be an excellent place to start.
“I am not negotiating on behalf of anyone,” he told Hungarian radio during a brief layover in Budapest between meetings with Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv and Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Hungary will occupy the European Union’s rotating presidency for six months.
Mr Orban followed up on his first visit to Kyiv since the war began with the first trip by an EU leader to Russia in April 2022. That trip to the Kremlin undoubtedly enraged his European allies.
Charles Michel, president of the European Council of 27 EU states, stated that the rotating presidency did not have the authority to engage with Russia on the EU’s behalf.
Mr Orban acknowledged the situation but stated that he was clarifying the facts. “I am asking questions.”
In Kyiv, he submitted “three or four” questions to President Zelensky “so that we can understand his intentions, and where the red line is, the boundary up to which he can go in the interest of peace”.
He has also praised two other allies, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Meeting Mr Erdogan on his arrival at the NATO summit in Washington, he described him as “the only man who has overseen an agreement between Russia and Ukraine” thus far, referring to the now-defunct Black Sea grain pact.
China not only loves peace but has also put forward a series of constructive and important initiatives [for resolving the war],” he said of President Xi Jinping, according to Chinese official media.
The final stop on his whirlwind journey was to presidential candidate Donald Trump, another close pal whom he ardently supports to win again in November and considers a man of peace.
In one interview, he stated that “he did not initiate a single war” during Trump’s four-year presidency.
This has been a spectacular tour into the international spotlight for the head of a little East European country of 9.7 million people. But who is it meant to impress, and will it have any effect?
His message is aimed mainly at the home people.
Viktor Orban has had a rather difficult year so far, losing two of his party’s most prominent female MPs to a scandal in February and seeing the rise of his first serious competitor in over a decade, Peter Magyar.
In June, Mr Orban’s Fidesz party won an outstanding 45% of European votes, compared to 30% for Mr Magyar’s three-month-old Tisza party.
However, he lost more than 700,000 votes (one in four) compared to the previous legislative elections in 2022.
For the first time, he does not appear invincible.
What better way to show Hungarians that their leader was still influential than to parade around the world stage on a “peace tour?
His objective was also aimed at a global audience, as his new Patriots for Europe (PfE) group in the European Parliament gathered 84 MEPs from primarily far-right parties in 11 countries.
Patriots for Europe has become the third largest faction in parliament, edging out Giorgia Meloni’s Conservatives and Reformists.
Mr Orban’s visit to Moscow earned him glowing accolades from the Russians: “We take it extremely positively. “We believe it will be beneficial,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The United States could have been more impressed.
We would welcome, of course, actual diplomacy with Russia to make it clear that Russia must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “But that is not at all what this visit appears to have been.”
At the same time, the US welcomed Mr Orban’s first visit to neighbouring Ukraine since the beginning of the full-fledged Russian incursion.
The Hungarian leader has yet to reveal much about the actual content of his conversations in Kyiv, Moscow, and Beijing.
A leaked version of his letter to Charles Michel, sent from Azerbaijan, provides some hints.
Mr Orban told the European Council president that Mr Putin was ready for a ceasefire as long as Ukraine did not reorganise its troops on the front lines.
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On July 2, in Kyiv, the Ukrainian leader used a similar argument three days earlier, telling Mr Orban that the Russians would take advantage of any ceasefire to regroup their invasion forces.
Mr Orban appeared “surprised” that President Zelensky still believed Ukraine could reclaim its lost territories.
According to the leaked letter, Vladimir Putin warned Mr Orban that “time favours Russian forces”.
When Mr Orban arrived in Washington a few days later, he posted another video on Facebook arguing that NATO “should return to its original spirit: Nato should win peace, not the wars around it.”
Unlike his NATO partners, Viktor Orban sees Russia’s two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine as a civil war between two Slavic states, exacerbated by US assistance for one.
He probably agrees on one thing: the conflict will only get worse this autumn.
He believes a November Trump presidential victory will compel Ukraine and Russia to negotiate.
