Orban Meets Trump as Allies Condemn Diplomatic Freelancing
(Bloomberg) -- Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban traveled to Florida to meet Donald Trump in the latest stop on his self-styled “peace mission” to resolve the war in Ukraine, which has angered Western allies.
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Orban posted a photo with the Republican nominee and former US president at his Mar-a-Lago resort, showing the pair giving a thumbs up, in a post by the Hungarian leader on social media platform X. “He’s going to solve it,” Orban said on X, an apparent reference to his assertion that a Trump presidency could bring a quicker end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Thank you Viktor. There must be PEACE, and quickly,” Trump said in a post on the right-wing social media platform Truth Social. “Too many people have died in a war that should have never started!”
Orban is the European Union’s leader with the closest contacts with Russia’s Vladimir Putin — and has worked to stall Western aid to Ukraine. He met Trump in March, when he said the former US president pledged to “not give a penny” to Kyiv if he returns to the White House. Orban said that would force Ukraine to abandon its military resistance and try to seek a deal with Moscow.
The Hungarian leader made his way to Florida from the NATO summit, where his country rejected taking part in the military alliance’s deepening support for Ukraine.
After visiting Kyiv last week, Orban blindsided and angered Western allies by also making a trip to Moscow and Beijing to meet with the Russian and Chinese leaders, leveraging Hungary’s rotating six-month presidency of the EU to lend the talks more weight.
Ministers from Sweden, Finland, Poland and three Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — will skip informal meetings in Hungary during the first phase of its six-month EU presidency this summer, to protest Orban’s freewheeling diplomacy, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told reporters on Thursday. His government will send lower-level officials instead.
Orban “is, in effect, abusing the presidency, kidnapping it for his own purposes,” Kristersson told reporters on Thursday at the NATO summit in Washington. “I’ve been very clear that he doesn’t speak for other heads of government, and even less so for the EU system, when he travels to Russia.”
--With assistance from Deana Kjuka and Andras Gergely.
(Updates with Trump’s comment in third paragraph)
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