Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has broken his silence after Vladimir Putin was left humiliated last month when Donald Trump cancelled their high-level meeting in Budapest. In late October, a session between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was postponed after it became clear that the Russian President was not ready to make concessions to end the war in Ukraine, which was expected to have a ripple effect on a potential second Putin-Trump summit.
Now, the potential host country’s leader has stated that he believes the two world leaders will still meet in Budapest, although he is currently unable to confirm the date. According to Mr Orban, the US-Russia summit is still on the agenda, but is being delayed. “The event that’s being delayed will still happen. Just not when we want, but a little later,” he said in an interview with Hungarian TV channel ATV.
Hungary’s prime minister added that “peace talks” have stalled over territorial issues, because Russia wants to occupy all of Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast before negotiating peace.
Putin has said securing the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region – which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk region – is now his main priority. It is thought that Russian forces currently control at least 90% of the resource-rich region. Crucially, though, the Institute for the Study of War has estimated that Ukraine still controls a belt of “fortress cities”, including Kostiantynivka, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Sloviansk. It is also thought that Putin will have to sacrifice between 500,000 and one million men if he wants to seize all of Donbas, according to a top military analyst.
Mr Orban also spoke on the so-called “Istanbul agreements” of 2022, which proposed the surrender of Ukraine’s sovereignty, end its NATO membership plans and impose limits on its military, claiming the deal had been close to success but “the Anglo-Saxons destroyed it”.
Mr Orban met with President Trump on November 7 at the White House, during which the Hungarian leader urged him to hold the summit with Putin in Budapest. However, Mr Trump said he saw no reason to meet with the Kremlin leader for the time being.
During this meeting, the US granted Hungary a one-year exemption from US sanctions for using Russian oil and gas. Last month, Mr Trump imposed Ukraine-related sanctions on Russian oil companies Lukoil and Rosneft that carried the threat of further sanctions on entities in countries that buy oil from those firms.
Mr Trump and Putin met at the Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, where the main topic of discussion was the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. This marked the first time Putin was invited to a Western country since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The summit ended without an agreement being announced, but Mr Trump later said that in his view, the onus was on Ukraine to cede territory.