Prime Minister Viktor Orban skipped a meeting with President Joe Biden and the leaders of NATO’s eastern flank on Wednesday, leaving Hungary’s ceremonial president, Katalin Novak, to attend in his place.
At a press conference the same day, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto reiterated Budapest’s desire to see fighting stop and peace talks begin. “Having seen and listened to the speeches by the presidents of the US and Russia yesterday, I think they would have made humanity a much bigger service by talking to each other,” Szijjarto said.
“It’s necessary to put an end to this [conflict] immediately, because if a ceasefire and peace talks do not take place right at this moment, a huge problem will result,” the Hungarian top diplomat said. Szijjarto stressed that “every single day” the crisis continues, “people die, families are torn apart, families have to flee,” and the world risks entering the “25th hour” of a possible nuclear crisis. “Don’t make the situation worse, the war must end,” he said.
Biden Doubles Down on Anti-Russia Rhetoric
At his meeting with officials from the Bucharest Nine, the nine NATO nations flanking Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in the Baltic, and Central and Southern Europe, Biden made no mention of the possibility of peace talks, instead boasting about how “years ago, when we were expanding NATO,” he “was the one in the United States Senate who was pushing the hardest to expand NATO for membership of many of you sitting around this table.”
Sarcastically referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin as his “friend,” Biden repeated a line from his speech in Poland Tuesday night - “You keep asking for the Finlandization of NATO. You’re going to get the NATOization of Finland.” ("Finlandization" is a Cold War-era term referring to the process by which a powerful country sways a smaller country to agree to bloc neutrality while the latter otherwise maintains its political and economic sovereignty). “Well, it happened. Not only are we strong as we were, we’re stronger,” Biden said.
In a separate, fiery speech in Warsaw on Tuesday night, Biden again made no mention of peace talks or a ceasefire, boasting instead that the US had “assembled a worldwide coalition of more than 50 nations to get critical weapons and supplies to the brave Ukrainian fighters on the frontlines,” and stressing that “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.” Blaming Putin for the conflict and suggesting that the Russian president “chose this war,” Biden said Putin could end the crisis “with a word” – presumably capitulation to Ukraine and its Western patrons.
In his own speech Tuesday, Putin reiterated that Russia did “everything in our power” to resolve the Ukraine crisis “by peaceful means” going back to 2014, the US-backed coup in Kiev, and the war in Donbass, and recalled that Moscow had spent decades seeking a constructive dialog with the West, and an indivisible, equality-based system of joint security, only to receive a “hypocritical” response – “NATO’s expansion to our borders, and the creation of new deployment areas for missile defense in Europe and Asia.”
Russia has repeatedly outlined its conditions for peace in Ukraine – security for Crimea and Donbass, and Ukrainian neutrality. Last fall, Western media reported that now ex-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kiev on NATO’s behalf in the spring of 2022 to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off negotiations with Russia as a peace deal seemed imminent. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to corroborate this information earlier this month, saying both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders had spoken to him and appeared ready to make "big concessions" to reach peace, but that the US and its allies “blocked” any agreement.