Former President Donald Trump claims rather confidently that he can solve the Ukraine conflict in one day. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has committed Hungary’s presidency of the Council of the European Union over the next six months to peacemaking, and he spent the first week flying to meetings with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. It is thought that Trump has in mind conditioning U.S. military aid to Ukraine upon Kyiv’s participation in negotiations with Moscow—including cutting off such aid if Kyiv refuses to negotiate.
The day before Putin’s July 5 meeting with Orbán, at his July 4 press conference in Astana, he was asked by Rossiyskaya Gazeta about the fact that Trump “has already said on many occasions during the debates that he is ready to finish the conflict in Ukraine literally overnight. There are also some reports that Trump may stop NATO expansion to the East. How seriously do you take such promises yourself?” Putin replied somewhat thoughtfully: “You know, we take seriously enough the things that Mr. Trump is saying as a presidential candidate about his readiness and wish to stop the war in Ukraine. Naturally, I do not know his possible proposals as to how he is going to do it—and this is, of course, the key question. However, I have no doubt that he is saying it sincerely, and we support it.”
Perhaps of some note is a previous trip that Orbán took—on March 8 to Mar-a-Lago, where he seems to have spent the evening with Trump. Trump’s campaign released a generic statement about their one-hour meeting, and the two attended together a Palm Beach Symphony concert. (It was entitled “Orchestral Elegance Meets Rock Legends,” and the symphony performed with two tribute bands, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.) Trump told the crowd: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.” Orbán is “a noncontroversial figure because he said, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and … he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”
