Hungary’s foreign minister on Monday lambasted the U.S. for authorizing Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia using American-supplied long-range missiles.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s top diplomat said Donald Trump’s U.S. election victory has created a new reality in which “the people are calling for peace” — instead of what Budapest, which maintains ties to Moscow, sees as the escalation of war.
“The pro-war mainstream has launched a final, desperate attack on the new reality,” Péter Szijjártó wrote in a Facebook post. “In their final desperation, these pro-war forces do not even seem to shy away from the worst: expanding the war in Ukraine to a global scale.”
Biden on Sunday gave Ukraine permission to use U.S.-supplied missiles to strike deeper into Russia, a long-awaited step as Ukrainian troops who are occupying part of Russia’s Kursk region brace for an assault by tens of thousands of Russian and North Korean troops.
“The hawkish politicians ousted from power refuse to take note of the will of the people. This is not only undemocratic, but also extremely dangerous,” Szijjártó added.
It remains to be seen how Trump will approach the war in Ukraine, as the president-elect has been critical of American military aid to Kyiv, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hopes to take advantage of Trump’s “peace through strength” policy.
However, Hungary has been calling for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine for months, which Zelenskyy regularly rejects, most recently calling it “nonsense.”
The Hungarian foreign minister is heading to Brussels for Monday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers, the first since the U.S. election two weeks ago. Budapest has been an EU outlier in continuing relations with Moscow during the Kremlin’s nearly three years of all-out war in Ukraine.
“It will be a tough battle, because we need to stop the escalation,” Szijjártó added.
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