Hungary’s Orban Becomes Self-Proclaimed Global Peacekeeper Without a Plan

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has no peace plan of his own, but he has spent the past two weeks on a whirlwind tour of Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington and even Mar-a-Lago, in a solo mission that has angered EU and US leaders.

“Peace will not come naturally in the Russia-Ukraine war, someone has to create it,” he declared in videos posted daily on his Facebook page.

He has been heavily criticised by both Brussels and Washington for undermining EU and NATO unity and cozying up to Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Few would dispute his central premise, that there can be no peace without peacekeepers. But his close economic ties to the Russian president leave him open to accusations of being a puppet of Mr Putin.

Hungary’s right-wing prime minister said a ceasefire with a specific duration would be a start.

“I am not negotiating on behalf of anyone,” he told Hungarian radio during a brief stop in Budapest between a visit to Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv and a visit to Mr Putin in Moscow.

For the next six months, Hungary will hold the rotating presidency of the European Union.

Mr Orban followed up his first visit to Kyiv since the war began with the first trip by an EU leader to Russia since April 2022. That visit to the Kremlin clearly angered his European partners.

Charles Michel, head of the European Council of the 27 EU governments, said the rotating presidency did not give the EU a mandate to engage with Russia on its behalf.

Mr Orban admitted that was true, but stressed: “I am clarifying the matter… I am asking questions.”

In Kyiv, he asked President Zelensky “three or four questions so we can understand his intentions, and where the red lines are, the lines that he can go to in the interest of peace”.

He also lavished praise on two other allies, Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Meeting Mr Erdogan on his way to the NATO summit in Washington, he said Mr Erdogan was “the only one who has supervised the deal between Russia and Ukraine” so far, referring to the now-defunct Black Sea grain deal.

“China not only loves peace but also puts forward a series of constructive and important initiatives [for resolving the war]”, he said of President Xi Jinping, according to Chinese state media.

The final visit on his whirlwind tour was to meet presidential candidate Donald Trump, another close ally whom he strongly backs to win in November and whom he calls a man of peace.

In an interview, he claimed that during Trump’s four-year presidency, “he hasn’t started a single war.”

It is a remarkable trip, one that has brought international attention to the leader of a small Eastern European country of 9.7 million people. But who is the trip designed to impress, and what effect might it have?

The main target of this message is the domestic public.

Viktor Orban has had a relatively bad year so far, losing his party’s two most high-profile female politicians to a scandal in February, and seeing the emergence of his first serious rival in more than a decade – Peter Magyar.

In June, Mr Orban’s Fidesz party won an impressive 45% of the vote in the European elections, compared with 30% for Mr Magyar’s three-month-old Tisza party.

But he lost more than 700,000 votes (one in four) compared to the last parliamentary election in 2022.

For the first time, he no longer appeared invincible.

What better way to show the Hungarian people that their leader is still strong than to march around the world on a global tour “to create peace”?

His mission also reached out to the international public, in a week when his new Patriots for Europe (PfE) group in the European Parliament attracted 84 MEPs mainly from far-right parties in 11 countries.

The Patriots for Europe party has emerged as the third largest faction in parliament, surpassing its rivals the Conservatives and the Reformists of Italian Giorgia Meloni.

Mr Orban’s visit to Moscow has received warm praise from Russians: “We consider this a very, very positive visit. We believe that this visit can be very useful,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

The United States is not very impressive.

“Of course, we welcome substantive diplomacy with Russia to make clear to Russia that they need to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, that they need to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” said State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “But that’s absolutely not what this visit appears to be about.”

At the same time, the United States welcomed Mr. Orban’s first visit to neighboring Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began.

The Hungarian leader has revealed little about the actual content of his talks in Kyiv, Moscow or Beijing.

A leaked version of his letter to Charles Michel, sent from Azerbaijan, offers some clues.

Mr Orban told the president of the European Council that Mr Putin was ready for a ceasefire, as long as it did not give Ukraine the opportunity to reorganise its troops on the front line.

Three days earlier in Kyiv, on July 2, the Ukrainian leader used a similar argument when he told Mr Orban that Russia would take advantage of any ceasefire to regroup its invading forces.

Mr Orban was apparently “surprised” that President Zelensky still believed Ukraine could regain lost territories.

And according to the leaked letter, Vladimir Putin told Mr Orban that “time is on the side of the Russian forces”.

Upon arriving in Washington a few days later, Mr Orban posted another video on Facebook, saying he would argue that NATO “should return to its original spirit: NATO must win peace, not wars around it”.

Unlike his NATO allies, Viktor Orban sees Russia’s two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine as a civil war between two Slavic nations, prolonged by the United States’ support for one of them.

One thing he probably agrees on is that this fall the conflict will only get worse.

He believes that Trump’s victory in the presidential election in November will force Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table.