PM Orbán: Ukraine ran out of strength

The war in Ukraine cannot be resolved on the battlefield, only through diplomacy and talks, and the first step would be an immediate ceasefire, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told public radio on Friday.

Orbán said in the interview that Hungary must be persistent in urging peace. “If they throw us out the window, we must come back through the door, and if they push us out the door, we must come back through the window,” he added. He said the war was very costly and Ukraine had run out of money, and it was barely surviving. Its army was operational owing purely to western money, he added.

“There are two questions: one concerns a decision by the president of the United States on how long they will be spending billions here in eastern Europe, and the other is how long Europe can endure,” Orbán said. The EU can generate money if member states “throw their money into shared coffers”, he said. The question, however, remained: “how long can we last when the European economy is in trouble and the we cannot see any end to the war?”

“We have already given more than 70 billion euros, but we can’t see how this has been spent; the accounts have not been done,” Orbán said. In this situation, at the halfway point of the 7-year budget cycle, the European Commission is asking member states to contribute a total of 100 billion euros, he added.

War weighing on world economy

The war in Ukraine is weighing down the world economy, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told public radio on Friday. Global economic trends are increasingly characterised by seclusion, isolation and “a kind of ghettoization,” he said in the interview, adding that instead connection, cooperation and division of labour would be better for production and economic growth.

Orban said Hungary had at last become competitive before the outbreak of the war which had since clouded the entire system of global economic ties and served as an excuse to sever relationships on which the well-being of tens of millions of countries and people depended. Here is the full interview:

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