Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban jetted off to Florida on Thursday to meet with former US President Donald Trump after the end of the NATO summit in Washington.
The sit-down at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is likely to further upset Budapest’s allies after Orban drew widespread ire from European counterparts for meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin last week.
Right-wing Orban, whose country took over the rotating presidency of the European Union this month, has been a vocal supporter of Trump and last met the 2024 Republican presidential hopeful in March.
“We discussed ways to make peace,” Orban said in a post on social media Thursday evening with a picture of the two leaders meeting. “The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”
Orban sparked uproar in the EU by jetting to Moscow to hold talks with Putin on what the Hungarian leader described as a “peace mission” over the war in Ukraine.
His visit to Russia followed a trip to Kyiv for talks with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The 27-nation EU bloc has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and imposed unprecedented sanctions on Moscow.
The Hungarian leader seemed isolated at the NATO summit in Washington and hardly spoke to the media.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, US President Joe Biden, set to face Trump in November, said: “I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now; there’s not much that he is prepared to do in terms of accommodating any change in his behavior.”
Orban, like Trump, has expressed skepticism about the role NATO countries are playing in supporting Ukraine and refuses to send Kyiv weapons, saying it would fuel the conflict.
His meeting with Trump, who has been critical of the central role played by the United States in NATO, came after Biden sought to rally the alliance at the Washington summit.
With AFP
