Orbán blasts EU as ‘Ukrainian budget,’ claims only Trump can bring peace, warns of armed Ukraine threat

Hungary must stay on the side of peace, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview to the Ultrahang YouTube channel on Thursday.

Asked why he stood firmly for keeping Hungary out of the war from the beginning, Orbán said his “firm conviction” was founded on national interests, among other reasons. “Hungary cannot come out well of a situation where 800,000 or a million people are armed in Ukraine, creating a larger and stronger army than Hungary’s; only God knows what that would be used in the coming decade,” he said.

Orbán said “no condition is given” for Ukraine to win against Russia. Ukraine “has fewer men and less money than Russia even is the West stuffs them with money, its weapons industry is decades behind Russia’s, and, most importantly, Russia is a nuclear power, and no one … has ever defeated a nuclear superpower”. “I have always thought that the plan that Ukraine should defeat Russia on the frontline, possibly destabilising it so it can be transformed, was a foolish one,” Orbán said.

Meanwhile, Orbán said the focus of “the historic time we are living in” was not the Russia-Ukraine war but “the problem of Christian-Muslim coexistence.”

Orbán: EU budget ‘actually Ukrainian budget’

The European Union budget is actually all about Ukraine, it is a Ukrainian budget, Orbán said.

He said that even if it was called the EU budget, it was in reality a Ukrainian budget because it was built on the basic idea that Ukraine was part of the EU. The most important idea behind this budget is the inclusion of Ukraine, so “it is not simply pro-Ukraine but it is a Ukrainian budget”, he added.

He said around 20-25 percent of all resources were automatically directed to Ukraine, and 10-11 percent for the repayment of interests went to loans taken out earlier. He added that no matter what figure was written on the cover, around 30-32 percent of it was non-existent money “which has already gone”. Orbán said that even if the budget seemed larger, the money included was much less than previously planned.

He added that a Hungarian problem in the budget was that the tools for blackmail had been left in it. “If you are not supporting Ukraine membership and do not let in migrants or resist in the gender issue, then eventually you will be subjected to blackmail from Brussels by financial means, which this budget enables,” Orbán said. He added that as long as he was a prime minister he would not vote in support of this budget.

He also said that for Hungary it was still much more worthwhile to remain inside the EU and fight for internal changes than to quit. He added that there was no specific point after which it was not worthwhile to stay in but he could promise to Hungarian voters that in case there comes a point when he sees it is not worth remaining a member, he would tell them.

Orbán: ‘There’s a rift in the transatlantic world’

There is a rift within the transatlantic world between a progressive, liberal Europe and the US which is going in a patriotic-conservative direction, Orbán said. He said that in world politics, Europe is pro-war and the US pro-peace. “I can’t see that gap closing,” he added.

“I hoped that the relatively harmonic, joint economic policy between Europe and the US based on similar ideological approaches to trade will persist until 2030. The trade war is about the opposite of that; the US developed an economic policy of its own, even against Europe,” he said.

He said that by 2030, the world would look very different; “we are facing great trials, we must maneuvre calmly, deftly in those years,” Orbán said.

Orbán: No peace unless Russia, US reach agreement

The war in Ukraine will not end unless the Russian and US presidents sit down for talks and reach a comprehensive agreement of which the war is an important element but not the only one, the prime minister said.

Orbán said that if everyone wanted peace “it is impossible that peace would not be achieved”. “What happens in the current situation is that everyone says they want peace, yet some of them do not really want it,” he added.

Orbán said that Europeans and Ukrainians obviously wanted to continue war no matter what they said, and the US president truly wanted peace. “As for the Russians, what’s certain is that they want to reach the marked territorial borders and want to prevent, if necessary by war, that Ukraine should become a NATO member or a NATO weapons depository,” he added.

Beyond the issue of the war, the comprehensive Russia-US agreement would cover the development of energy prices, US access to Russian markets and Russian access to US markets, economic sanctions, technology, and the issue of arms control, he said.

Orbán said Hungary was a “dangerous example” showing in Europe that it was possible to take a stand against war, to stand up for peace, and “if you are strong enough you can stay out of the war”. Hungary was “the antithesis of all that Europe is doing, talking about peace but in truth being interested in maintaining the war,” he added.

He said he was regularly putting in use all his links with both the Russian and the US presidents to promote peace.

While US President Donald Trump has failed to create peace since his inauguration in January, “if Biden had stayed or Kamala Harris had come in his stead, we would be in the middle of a world war.” Trump “is a man of peace and doubtlessly the only one with a chance to contribute to a Russia-Ukraine peace” deal, he said.

Asked why he stood firmly for keeping Hungary out of the war from the beginning, Orbán said his “firm conviction” was founded on national interests, among other reasons. “Hungary cannot come out well of a situation where 800,000 or a million people are armed in Ukraine creating a larger and stronger army than Hungary’s; only God knows what that would be used in the coming decade,” he said.

Orbán said “no condition is in place” for Ukraine to win against Russia. Ukraine “has fewer men and less money than Russia even is the West stuffs them with money, its weapons industry is decades behind Russia’s, and, most importantly, Russia is a nuclear power, and no one … has ever defeated a nuclear superpower”. “I have always thought that the plan that Ukraine should defeat Russia on the frontline, possibly destabilising it so it can be transformed, was a foolish one,” Orbán said.

Meanwhile, Orbán said the focus of “the historic period we are living in” was not the Russia-Ukraine war but “the problem of Christian-Muslim coexistence”. “What’s the point in Christian, white Europeans killing each other by the hundreds of thousands on the Russia-Ukraine border while masses of people, who are strangers to our culture … and belong to the world of Islam are allowed to enter at the other end of the continent?”

Orbán said that this “abnormal behaviour” was a sign that “political leaders are misreading the historic time”.

“The power issues of the Russia-Ukraine war, and its conclusion, may be more important at the moment, but it isn’t the historic time that will determine the lives of our children and grandchildren.”

He said there was no danger of Russia attacking NATO member states, adding that while Russia had some 140 million inhabitants, the EU had 400 million. Further, the money Russia could plough into a war with Europe “is a fraction” of what the West could mobilise, even without US help, he said.

He said he had yet to see a “sensible argument” of why Russia would start a war against Western Europe “that it could only lose”.

At the same time, the Baltic states and Poland “are worried that NATO won’t protect them against a Russian attack; that explains why they want to beat the Russians now and bring the matter to a head,” Orbán said.

At the same time, the solution to the problem is not on the battlefield, he said. “The response to their dilemma is not forcing a war but strengthening NATO,” he added.

Orbán said the NATO summit of 2008 had proven that Russians had the power to prevent Ukrainians or Georgians from becoming NATO members, and since that time once again Russia had to be considered a persisting, long-lasting and continually strengthening player in world politics.

He said this was a reality and added that when he visited Moscow and China ahead the 2010 elections, he had clarified Hungary’s relations with these countries. He added that at the time he presented how Hungary planned to cooperate with Russia and China after 2010 and agreements had been signed.

Orbán said that at talks with the Russian president in Saint Petersburg in 2009, they had come to an agreement that in line with the Hungarian proposal, historic disputes should be put to the side and left for historians “so they do not burden everyday cooperation”. The Russian president had maintained this stand ever since and so had Hungary, he added. Before the start of the war and the period of sanctions, Russian-Hungarian economic cooperation had been good for Russia and very good for Hungary, not only in the energy sector but also in other areas, he said.

Orbán said that jumping back 100 years in time from 1990 would show a Europe where were intellectual dispute focused on “how countries should be led and made free and happy.” He said one of these positions was the liberal and the other conservative, which he added was the basic structure of European policies up until the appearance of Hitler and the creation of the communist regime in Russia.

Since these became important factors in Europe, the intellectual structure of European political debates also changes because the conservatives and the liberals, both believing in deocracy, “joined forces”. Up until 1990, the alliance of liberals and conservatives stood against the totalitarian regimes on the other side, but this ended in 1990, he added.

Liberals quickly realised that the fight was once again between them and the conservatives, and the world order that existed before the totalitarian regimes and the first world war returned, he said.

“They constructed a theory which essentially said that those that are not liberal and do not accept the basic elements of a liberal understanding of the world but pursue conservative or Christians beliefs belonged outside of democracy,” he said. European politics had been locked in this “linguistic prison” for a long time, “until one day it was freed from this framework with an important contribution by Hungary, and it was shown through the work of the Hungarian government and the ruling Fidesz through the creation of the Patriots for Europe group, that there exists democratic politics based on Christian, conservative, national values. Liberals deny this even today, but after 2010, the entire European political stage was rearranged,” he said.

Commenting on the European Union budget, he said it was actually all about Ukraine, it was a Ukrainian budget.

Orbán said that even if it was called the EU budget, it was in reality a Ukrainian budget because it was built on the basic idea that Ukraine was part of the EU. The most important idea behind this budget is the inclusion of Ukraine, so “it is not simply pro-Ukraine but it is a Ukrainian budget”, he added.

He said around 20-25 percent of all resources were automatically directed to Ukraine, and 10-11 percent went towards the repayment of interests of loans taken out earlier. He added that no matter what figure was written on the cover, around 30-32 percent of it was non-existent money “which has already gone”. Orbán said that even if the budget seemed larger, the money included was much less than previously planned.

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