Orbán leaked NATO’s secret plan about Ukraine? Russia outraged

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave an interview with the public broadcaster Kossuth Rádió on Friday and said it had become a legitimate initiative for some European leaders to send peacekeepers to Ukraine. Russia thinks Orbán leaked NATO’s secret plan, and Moscow seems outraged. Or is that just scenery?

Viktor Orbán leaked secret information?

According to index.hu, Orbán said on Friday that some European Union leaders are close to accepting the thought of sending European peacekeeping troops to Ukraine. That would mean that official NATO forces could enter the conflict either by starting an attack or defending their positions against a Russian attack. Anyway, such an idea would surely escalate the war considerably.

It would be difficult to explain why NATO is not at direct war with Russia provided their soldiers were killed by Russian troops in Ukraine. Of course, there are NATO countries whose citizens fight in Ukraine even now, but they are not part of the official army.

Orbán reminded in his interview that one year earlier, European leaders were debating about whether they should send lethal equipment to Ukraine. Now they send more deadly weapons to the front. That is the chain of thoughts that already guided some European leaders to start thinking about sending even peacekeepers to the war-torn country.

“World War is a realistic option”, writes Orbán’s Facebook post:

ISW says there are no such thoughts among the EU leaders

It seems that the Kremlin follows what the Hungarian prime minister says. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said that, provided such an EU plan exists, it could be dangerous. He added that they should keep an eye on such statements because if they read that as a leaked plan, it may be very harmful.

What’s more, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the head of the country’s Security Council, also reacted to what Orbán said, a report of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) stated. To start with, he wrote on his Telegram channel about NATO troops even though Orbán talked about the EU, not NATO leaders. Secondly, he cleared that such troops would be the enemies of Russia. Thus, they would be legitimate targets. “We shall see whether Europe is prepared for the long queue of the peacekeeper coffins”, he added confidently. He referred to the Iraqi, Korean, Vietnam and Yugoslavian wars to clear for his followers how US and allied troops would fail in Ukraine.

Interestingly, Jarosław Kaczyński, the chairman of the governing PiS, talked about sending a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine last 15 March. However, nobody supported that idea then. And ISW says there is no sign that any Western politicians seriously consider such an initiative. Therefore, Medvedev only used the Hungarian prime minister’s words to show it is not Russia but the West who would like to escalate the conflict. Or is that just scenery and even he does not consider a peacekeeping mission a realistic option?

Read also:

• Transcarpathian professor and soldier set to become Ukraine’s ambassador to Hungary
• Russia has declared Hungary an ‘unfriendly country’, retaliatory measures to come

Source: index.hu, portfolio.hu