Statements from Orbán outrage Kyiv: ‘Call your friend Putin’

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Friday that in the current situation, it would be a “bloodbath to start a counteroffensive”. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the Hungarian PM’s absurd stance violated EU values and international law. He wrote that if the Hungarian prime minister is really concerned about human lives, he should call his “friend Vladimir Putin” to withdraw his troops from Ukraine. In that case, the war would end.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was a guest on Kossuth Radio’s Good Morning, Hungary (Jó reggelt, Magyarország) programme on Friday morning. He discussed Hungary’s 2024 budget, inflation, the Turkish presidential election and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, among other issues. We wrote about this in detail HERE.

On the sanctions packages closely linked to the war, he said that the conflict in Ukraine has winners and losers. However, those who lose relatives are the ones who suffer the most. “In the East, the situation is unchanged, the war has entered a brutal phase,” Index quotes Orbán as saying.

Orbán said that “Hungary is not involved in the war, we are watching from outside. It imposes a direct threat on us, but we are not involved.” According to him, “everybody in the West is enthusiastic about the Ukrainian counteroffensive”. However, “if I attack, my losses are three times greater than if I defend,” he said.

“In these circumstances, it is a bloodbath to launch a counter-attack. We must initiate a ceasefire before then. One of the biggest challenges in politics is to admit your own past mistakes. To such an extent they have fallen into the trap of believing that the war can be won with Western support and fighting that it will be very difficult for them to turn off this path,” he said.

This was the sentence that sparked a huge outcry among Ukrainians. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, responded with a lengthy post on Twitter. You can read his whole tweet below:

As we reported earlier today, Patriarch Kirill has written a letter to PM Viktor Orbán on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The Moscow Patriarch has awarded Orbán the First Degree of the Order of Glory and Honour.

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