Orbán: the USA could end the war in Ukraine immediately

The conflict in Ukraine will be drawn out because “westerners want the war to continue”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Friday. Orbán told public radio that “the government has very different tasks, and Hungarians will have a very different future, depending on whether there is a war or there is no war”. “The proportion and number of pro-war supporters remains overwhelming and there are hardly any of us using the voice of peace,” Orbán said. “We must be prepared that the war and sanctions will not disappear from our lives,” he added. If it actually happened, “a large part of the economic troubles would be fixed”.

Orbán said that in the current situation “we must bring down inflation. We discontinue certain measures and introduce others, whatever works we will keep”. He said the price monitoring system was very helpful in this regard and added that mandatory food discounts had also been introduced. “We can see that the inflation rate will decrease every month,” he added. He said a government meeting held in Sopronbanfalva, western Hungary, discussed ways to keep the war and illegal migrants away from Hungary and “protect families and pensioners from plans made by Brussels bureaucrats”.

Orbán said some “great issues” were kept on the agenda that “could determine our fate for decades”, citing energy supplies for the country in the next 10-20 years, ways to utilise Hungary’s favourable geographical position, preserving the quality of Hungarian agricultural products and issues concerning the military force and demographics. Meanwhile, the prime minister said the ongoing cabinet meeting was also focused on exploring the legal and political means available to prevent Brussels from implementing the plan on migrant quotas.

No ghettos

“If we obeyed Brussels, which we do not intend to do, we would be forced to build migrant ghettos in Hungary,” he added. “There’s another direct threat, and this one also comes from Brussels,” the prime minister said. He said the EU had again put forward a proposal that would lead to Hungary having to scrap its price caps on energy. Yet on Thursday the cabinet discussed “how we’re not going to scrap the utility price caps”, and how Hungarian interests could be enforced in energy regulation “at home and also in Brussels”, he added. “These clever men sit in a big bubble in Brussels and they think that that they understand the world better than we do here, in Budapest or now in Sopron,” he said.

Orbán said there was one more issue “which must be decided by all means” on Friday. A new waste management system has been introduced which would result in a significant disadvantage for Hungarian winemakers in the strong competition in Europe resulting from regulations affecting bottles. He also said that when Ukrainians were fighting for the survival of their nation in the war, “they do not care about the rest of the world”. “They can only look at the conflict through their own spectacles” which is normal but it means “we must keep our wits about it”. “If we did what the Ukrainian president is asking for, we’d be in the third world war,” Orbán said.

Orbán: NATO is at war with Russia

If Ukraine was given NATO membership now, it would immediately mean a third world war “because it would mean that NATO is at war with Russia”. He said that a favourable decision was reached in the end, with the majority not wanting to take on the risk of war and Ukraine was therefore not allowed to join. Orbán said Ukrainians’ communication style was “undoubtedly unusual” considering that “when you are in trouble and ask for help, you should behave correctly”. However, “Ukrainians are aggressive, making demands” while the people in Ukraine die by the hundreds and thousands on a daily basis, he added. The Ukrainians “are in great trouble, they face matters of life and death, and they see the world very differently from us”, he said.

Orbán said it was important that “we should not accept the perspective through which they look at the world because if we accept it, then we will slip into the war”. Those countries that supply weapons to Ukraine are already involved in the war, he said. Although Ukrainians have not been admitted into NATO and the direct threat of world war has been avoided, “we have not progressed closer to peace even by an inch,” he said. On the contrary, there is an escalation, with new and increasingly long-range weapons and effective explosives that the Ukrainians receive from western states, especially from the US, he said. “So the situation continues to be extremely dangerous,” he said.

In the Christian world “where we belong” the most important issue, which Hungary also argues for, is ceasefire and peace talks. It is also important for Hungarians because the war is in a neighbouring country and “various escalations could reach Transcarpathia and then Hungary”, he said. Orbán said that he agreed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the United States could end the war in Ukraine with immediate effect. He added that nobody knew why this was not happening.