Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (L) talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (R) at the Europe Tower before the start of the meeting in Brussels, Belgium, June 27, 2024.
Thierry Monas | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrived in Ukraine on Tuesday on his first wartime visit to the war-torn country.
Orban, widely seen as Russia’s closest ally within the EU and an outspoken critic of NATO’s support for Kiev, will meet with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss peace in the European region.
“The talks will focus on the possibilities for peace and current issues in Hungary-Ukraine bilateral relations,” Hungarian international spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said on social media.
Orban’s visit intensified months of frequent EU opposition to Kyiv’s financial aid package. Orban left the conference room in December in a historic, pre-agreed move so that EU leaders could adopt a unified position on opening accession talks with the war-torn country. The EU formally began membership discussions with Ukraine and Moldova last week, although the road ahead is long and difficult.
Orban, a self-proclaimed “peacemaker”, and his government have refused to send weapons to Ukraine and opposed further NATO support for non-member Kyiv, but have also agreed not to block NATO initiatives. Orban was absent from last month’s Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, where Hungary was represented by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.
The Hungarian prime minister is also one of the few Western leaders to meet with the increasingly isolated Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In October, he assured Putin that Hungary “never wanted to confront Russia,” according to the Associated Press.
This week’s visit comes on the second day of the EU’s rotating EU presidency under the nationalist government led by Orban, under the slogan “Make Europe Great Again” – reminiscent of former US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan. The meeting comes two weeks before a major NATO summit on July 9-11, with outgoing Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg saying he hoped the allies would provide Ukraine with Further long-term financial and security assistance agreed.
While Orban is not officially on the agenda for a meeting with Zelensky, he has previously raised questions about Ukraine’s alleged failure to safeguard the rights of Hungary’s ethnic minority, which is largely concentrated in the western Ukrainian region of Zakarya. Pathian region.
Hungary has outlined a series of demands for minority rights as a precondition for allowing Kyiv to join the EU. Ukraine’s parliament in December passed a key concession allowing higher education institutions to freely choose the language of instruction other than Russian, easing some of the long-standing fears among the region’s ethnic minorities since Ukraine passed the law in 2017. Making the language compulsory starting in fifth grade in public schools has sparked concern in the European Union.
