US President Donald Trump had reportedly phoned Hungarian leader Viktor Orban to discuss why his country is blocking Ukraine’s EU accession following Monday’s White House summit with Kyiv and EU leaders.
Under Orbán, Hungary aligns with Trump’s ideology while keeping close ties to Moscow – one of the few EU states to repeatedly veto Russia sanctions and block Ukraine’s accession talks.
Orbán’s stance has long strained EU unity, but European leaders now seem to have swayed Trump to press Orbán to reconsider blocking Ukraine’s EU accession.
Bloomberg, citing “people familiar with the matter,” reported on Tuesday that the call happened as Trump, European leaders, and President Volodymyr Zelensky discussed ways to end Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine centered on security guarantees on Kyiv, where the leaders reportedly asked Trump to pressure Orban during the conversation, which he supposedly did.
The rumor that Budapest is considered a possible venue for the planned in-person meeting between Zelensky and Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin likely arose from the phone call as well.
The outcome – and substance – of the call remain undisclosed, but Budapest’s actions and statements suggest that nothing was swayed.
On Tuesday, Orbán tacitly acknowledged the call happened while reiterating his opposition to Kyiv’s EU bid.
“It has been registered that Ukraine’s membership in the European Union does not mean any security guarantee, therefore the linking of membership and security guarantees is unnecessary and dangerous,” Orbán wrote in his Facebook update after a EU-leader consultation.
Even when a Russian missile struck Ukraine along the Hungarian border on Thursday, that did not appear to have altered Orbán’s pro-Kremlin stance.
On Thursday morning, a Russian missile struck western Ukraine’s Mukachevo during a massive aerial assault across Ukraine, destroying a US plant in the city located just 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Hungarian border.
The city lies in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia region – an area where Kyiv once accused Budapest of spying to gauge local reaction to a potential Hungarian incursion, sparking a major diplomatic spat.
In an update addressing Thursday’s attack, Orban praised Trump’s peace efforts without condemning Moscow’s role in the attack.
“The efforts towards peace and the negotiation process initiated by President Trump must continue. Only peace!” the update says.
At the end of the day Thursday, a wave of drones from Ukraine’s ‘Madyar Birds’ unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) unit struck Russia’s Unecha oil pumping station, one of the largest in the world, up in flames. The attack halted the Russian supply of crude oil to Hungary, and sparked protest from its foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó.
“News came that the Druzhba oil pipeline on the Russian-Belarusian border has been repeatedly attacked – for the third time in a short period of time. The supply of crude oil to Hungary has been stopped again,” he said.
Szijjártó labled it “another attack on Hungary’s energy security” and “another attempt to drag us into war.”