Image source, @Prime Minister Viktor Orban
- author, Nick Thorpe
- Role, BBC correspondent in Budapest
But Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has no peace plan of his own, but he has spent the past two weeks on a whirlwind tour that has taken him to Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington and even Mar-a-Lago, on a solo mission that has angered leaders in the European Union and the United States.
“Peace will not come automatically in the war between Russia and Ukraine, someone has to make it,” he says in videos he posts daily on his Facebook page.
Johnson has been bitterly attacked by Brussels and Washington for flouting the unity of the European Union and NATO and cozying up to Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Few dispute his central premise, that there can be no peace without peacemakers. But his close economic ties to the Russian president make him vulnerable to accusations of acting as Putin’s puppet.
The right-wing Hungarian prime minister said a ceasefire with a set deadline would be a start.
“I am not negotiating on behalf of anyone,” he told Hungarian Radio during a brief stop in Budapest between visits to Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv and Putin in Moscow.
Image source, Yuri Kochetkov/EPA/REX/Shutterstock
For the next six months, Hungary will hold the rotating presidency of the European Union.
Mr Orban followed his first visit to Kyiv since the start of the war with the first trip by an EU leader to Russia since April 2022. The visit to the Kremlin clearly angered his European partners.
Charles Michel, president of the European Council, which is made up of the EU’s 27 governments, said the rotating presidency did not give any mandate to deal with Russia on behalf of the EU.
Orban acknowledged that this was the case, but insisted: “I am stating the facts… I am asking questions.”
In Kyiv, he asked “three or four” questions to President Zelensky “so that we can understand his intentions, where the red line is, and the limits to which he can go for peace.”
Trump was also generous in his praise of two other allies, Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Meeting Erdogan upon his arrival at the NATO summit in Washington, Trump spoke of him as “the only man who has overseen a deal between Russia and Ukraine” so far, referring to the Black Sea grain deal that is no longer in effect.
Image source, Maxim Marusenko/NourPhoto via Getty Images
“China not only loves peace, but has also put forward a series of constructive and important initiatives. [for resolving the war]He said in a statement on behalf of President Xi Jinping, according to Chinese state media.
His final visit on his whirlwind tour was to presidential candidate Donald Trump, another close ally who is strongly backing him to win again in November and whom he refers to as a man of peace.
In an interview, he declared that during Trump’s four-year term he “did not start a single war.”
It has been a remarkable trip into the international spotlight for the leader of a small Eastern European nation of 9.7 million people. But which country is this trip meant to impress, and can it have any impact?
The main target of his message is the local audience.
Viktor Orbán has had a relatively bad year so far, losing two of his party’s most prominent female politicians to scandal in February, and seeing the emergence of his first serious challenger in more than a decade – Peter Magyar.
In June, Orban’s Fidesz party won 45% of the vote in the European elections, compared to 30% for the Hungarian’s three-month-old Tisza party.
But he lost more than 700,000 votes (one in four) compared to the last parliamentary elections in 2022.
For the first time, he doesn’t seem invincible.
What better way to show Hungarians that their leader is still strong than to parade across a world stage, on a world tour “for peace”?
His mission was also aimed at an international audience, in the week that his new Patriots for Europe (PfE) group in the European Parliament attracted 84 MEPs from mostly far-right parties in 11 countries.
The Patriots for Europe group has become the third-largest bloc in parliament, overtaking its rival, the Conservatives and Reformists group led by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.
Mr Orban’s visit to Moscow has been widely praised by Russians: “We take it very positively. We believe it can be very useful,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The United States was less impressed.
“We certainly welcome actual diplomacy with Russia to make clear to Russia that they need to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, they need to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But that’s not at all what this visit appears to have been,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
Meanwhile, the United States welcomed Mr Orban’s first visit to neighbouring Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The Hungarian leader has revealed little about the actual content of his talks in Kiev, Moscow or Beijing.
A leaked copy of his letter to Charles Michel, sent from Azerbaijan, provides some evidence.
Orban told the European Council president that Putin was open to a ceasefire, provided that it did not give Ukraine a chance to reorganize its military on the front lines.
Three days earlier in Kiev, on July 2, the Ukrainian leader had made a similar argument, telling Mr. Orban that the Russians would abuse any cease-fire to regroup their invading forces.
Orban appears to be “surprised” that President Zelensky still believes Ukraine is capable of regaining its lost territories.
Vladimir Putin told Orban that “time serves the Russian forces,” according to the leaked message.
Days after arriving in Washington, Orban posted another video on Facebook, in which he said he would argue that NATO “must return to its original spirit: NATO must bring peace, not wars around it.”
Unlike his NATO allies, Viktor Orban views Russia’s two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine as a civil war between two Slavic states, prolonged by American support for one of them.
The only thing they probably agree on is that the conflict will get worse this fall.
It is believed that Trump’s victory in the presidential election next November would force the Ukrainians and Russians to sit at the negotiating table.