Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has declared that Ukraine has lost its war against Russia, as he looked ahead to a planned meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has lost this war,” Orbán said in an interview with the far-right news site Mandiner.hu published Wednesday. “The Ukrainians have lost this war, Russia has won the war.”
The Hungarian leader argued that portraying the conflict as having an “open-ended” outcome was misleading, adding that Kyiv’s resistance has been sustained only through Western military and financial support. “Otherwise, this war would have been over long ago,” he said.
Orbán, a frequent critic of EU sanctions on Russia, on Tuesday refused to join a joint statement by the other 26 EU member states welcoming Trump’s efforts to end the conflict. The statement, which insisted Ukraine’s territorial integrity must be upheld and that “international borders must not be changed by force,” was rejected by Budapest on the grounds that it set conditions for negotiations without EU leaders being invited to the talks.
The Trump-Putin meeting, scheduled for Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, has raised concerns in Kyiv and across Europe that a deal could be struck forcing Ukraine into territorial concessions — a prospect Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out.
In a Facebook post, Orbán lamented the EU’s diminished role in the peace process. “It is sad enough that the EU has been pushed to the sidelines. The only thing worse will be if we were giving instructions from the sidelines,” he wrote.
