Orbán: Peace won’t be achieved by Ukraine or Russia; it has to come from outside

If it were up to Ukraine and Russia, there would never be peace, so peace can only come from the outside, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in his address at the Bálványos Summer University in Baile Tusnad, Romania on Saturday.

Photo: MTI/Veres Nándor

Both sides are taking brutal losses, yet they don’t want to reach a settlement, Orbán said, explaining that this was because both Ukraine and Russia believed that they could win and were fuelled by their own “perceived or real truth”.

Orbán said the Ukrainians saw the war as a Russian invasion that violated international law and their territorial sovereignty, and that they were defending themselves and fighting a war or independence.

The Russians, on the other hand, believed that there had been “serious NATO military developments in Ukraine”, that the country had been promised NATO membership, and they did not want to see either NATO troops or NATO weapons on the Russia-Ukraine border, he said. So, he said, Russia believed it had a right to self-defence and that the war had been provoked.

“So everyone has some kind of perceived or real truth, and neither side will give up the war,” the prime minister said.

“This is a straight path to escalation,” he said, stressing that there would be no peace if it were left up to the two warring sides. “Peace can only come from the outside,” Orbán said.

Orbán: ‘Time is on side of peace policy’

Addressing the Bálványos Summer University in Baile Tusnad, Romania, on Saturday, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that “time is on the side of the peace policy”.

“Trump ante portas,” the prime minister said, referring to the upcoming US presidential election. He said that if Europe did not shift to a “peace policy” by the time of the November election, it would have to do so after Trump’s victory, “admitting defeat” and bearing the political consequences alone.

Orbán noted that the European Union’s founding treaty included the words “the Union’s aim is to promote peace”.

He said Brussels “doesn’t like it when we call what they do a pro-war policy, because they think they’re supporting the war in the interest of peace”.

He added that since the start of the Hungarian “peace mission”, the US secretary of state had spoken with Russia’s foreign minister, and the Swiss foreign minister had also held talks with him.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he noted, had called Donald Trump, the former US president and Republican presidential candidate, and the Ukrainian foreign minister had visited Beijing.

“Although slowly, but we’re moving away from a European pro-war policy in the direction of a pro-peace policy,” Orbán added.

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