Orbán: Zelenskiy wants to drag as many states into the war as he can, including Hungary
Peace and security are now issues in the April 3 general election, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview to public radio on Sunday, adding that only the ruling Fidesz party could guarantee peace and security in Hungary.
Orbán said the “international dimension” provided an opportunity to “finally talk seriously, honestly and deeply about highly important issues.” The election, he added, would decide Hungary’s fate “for the next four years at the very least”. Also, the referendum on child protection held in parallel would have consequences and significance beyond Hungary at European level, too.
Orbán said
Hungary was “an island of tranquility” amid “this western gender insanity”.
“We’re still taking the traditional family approach,” he said. “The mother is a woman, the father a man, and they should leave our children be.” Assessing a European and NATO summit on the war in Ukraine earlier in the week, the prime minister said Hungary’s position had been carbon copied. NATO will not send troops to Ukraine nor transport weapons there, he said, though this did not stop individual member states doing so.
He said
“the problem with the Polish peace mission is there’s no peace”.
A ceasefire would have to be established first, he added, otherwise peacekeeping troops would get mixed up in the fighting. In connection with a no-fly zone, he said air warfare should be avoided. Shooting down aircraft would likewise mean taking part in the war, he added.
On the topic of Hungarian imports of Russian oil and gas, Orbán said the economy would tank if supplies were halted. Several EU member states agreed with Hungary that sanctions should not cover oil and gas, he said, referring specifically to Austria and Germany. He said the issue was not one of cost but “either the gas flows or it doesn’t”.
Orbán said stopping Russian gas and oil supplies would set the economy back 8-10 years.
He said Hungary was doing what it could “but we can’t be expected to ruin ourselves…” The prime minister insisted that Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, had addressed others besides himself at the recent summit, and “attacked anyone he considered was lacking in commitment” in defending Ukraine.
Orbán said Ukraine had an interest in involving “as many countries as possible” in the war, “so we must absolutely make clear that we will not take part in the war”. “Our moral responsibility is not for Ukraine but for our own people.” Hungary, he said, was providing Ukraine all the aid it could, but the government refused to do anything that would
“ruin the community of the nation”.
The dispute, he said, was not with Zelenskiy “but with the Hungarian left wing”. “We have been on the side of Hungarians for 1,100 years,” he said.
He rejected the leader of the opposition Democratic Coalition Ferenc Gyurcsány’s insistence that Hungarians were “morally defiling” themselves “by refusing to sacrifice our interests to Ukrainian interests”.
Hungarian policies, he added, were friendly neither to Ukraine nor to Russia, but took the Hungarian nation’s interest as its basis.
The “great powers”, Orbán insisted, were “not interested in the national basis but in an imperial or supranational basis”.
The prime minister said the war and Europe’s security situation had a bearing on the continent’s economic situation, and everything now had to be “recalculated”. At the EU summit, the other “important issue” besides the war was the issue of energy, he noted, adding that it was questionable as to whether Brussels bureaucrats “have a good energy policy today”. The various approaches of member states were starkly different, Orban said, and their respective proposals reflected this fact.
Source: MTI