PM Orbán: the Soros network lost the USA, ceasefire in Ukraine on the horizon

Maintaining a “strategic calm” in times of war is of crucial importance, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told public radio on Friday.

Christmas ceasefire important

Speaking from Brussels, the prime minister noted his recent proposal of a truce and a large-scale exchange of prisoners of war in the Russia-Ukraine conflict for the time of Orthodox Christmas.

Orbán said he had started the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the European Union with a “peace mission” and “made another round” at the end of it: he visited the president-elect of the United States, had long talks with the Russian president and met the president of Türkiye, too.

Concerning his proposal for a ceasefire, Orbán said once there was no chance for “a great, overall peace agreement and the parties are not willing to agree on a long-standing ceasefire, there should at least be truce at Christmas … even at the time of the first world war the belligerents did agree that nobody should die in the front lines for at least a few days.” He dismissed possible counter arguments, suggesting that a few days would not be sufficient for the warring parties to reorganise their troops. He also added that once a ceasefire could be achieved for Christmas time, it would raise the opportunity of negotiating a longer truce later on.

Putin considers

Orbán said he had convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin to consider his proposal, while “the Ukrainians had more of a gut reaction” but “if they sit down and think it over, they could easily change their mind, which I think would be in their interest.”

Concerning remarks by Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, Orbán said “one must not be provoked … we need to treat that with magnanimity”. He said that Zelensky was “the leader of a country in trouble, with foreign troops on its territory.” Ukraine has lost many millions of people because they left the country, hundreds of thousands have died … the country is full of injured people, widows, orphaned children, its energy infrastructure is in ruins and it is not clear how the country will make a living in future,” Orbán said. “The leader of such a country may make furious remarks,” Orbán said.

While the situation on the front lines of the war “changes by the day to the benefit of Russia and to the detriment of Ukraine … changes are happening in Washington, the headquarters of Western civilisation,” Orbán said. He added that those changes “will be good” for the West. “We’ll have a more normal life than before,” he said.

People fed up with war, sanctions, inflation

“Those two new developments should make us Hungarians cautious; if such great changes are about to happen, it is not worth insisting that irrespective of the changes we’ll keep doing what we have been doing,” he said, adding, however, that “apart from us there is hardly anybody else in Brussels that would think so.”

European leaders “feel that the war must be brought to an end” and the need to create a lasting, predictable security system that would make it possible for economic growth to resume in Europe. Orbán said the people were “fed up with the wartime situation, inflation and sanctions”.

Despite this, he added, “this past week the opposite of all of this has happened in the European Parliament and the European Commission”. He said the EP’s biggest parties had formed a pact and “put it in writing that they will continue doing what they’ve been doing: supporting migration, gender and the war”.

“So it doesn’t bother them that the world outside the Brussels bubble is changing, they want to keep moving ahead,” he said, adding that this indicated that the biggest problems today were in Brussels.

Lots of American money invested in Ukraine

Meanwhile, Orbán said he had been informed during his talks in the US that Europe and America had so far spent a combined 310 billion euros on the war in Ukraine. “This is a huge amount which would have been sufficient to do wonders” such as closing the gap between the Western Balkans and Europe or facilitating such development in the Sahel region that could help prevent illegal migration. “Those funds could have been spent on investment projects supporting Europe’s security, weapons factories or on the European economy,” Orbán said.

Concerning plans to give Ukraine fast-track EU accession, Orbán said “all countries with a strong agriculture have given an instant, negative reaction”. If Ukraine joins the EU “without resolving the situation of people making a living from agriculture”, farmers could go bankrupt and Hungary would be in a difficult position “to save its agriculture”, he said, and warned against a “hasty, ill-advised and too fast” procedure. He also added that the parties in the Patriots for Europe group included representatives of countries with a strong farming sector such as France, Italy, Austria, Poland, and Hungary.