“Hallelujah! This is what we were hankering for,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told Kossuth Rádió on Feb. 14. “This is what we have built our Hungarian strategy on: the war should not drag on, a new American president would come, he would cut the Gordian knot […] and forge peace.”

Emphasizing the benefits to Hungary, Orbán expressed the hope that peace talks would eventually lead to the end of sanctions against Russia, which he said had cost Hungary EUR 6.5 billion each year, totaling EUR 20 bln.

“If the U.S. president steps in and establishes peace and a deal is made, I believe Russia will be reintegrated into the world economy, the European security system, and even the European economic and energy system. That would give a huge boost to the Hungarian economy,” Orbán said. “We will benefit greatly from a peace deal,” he added.

Minister of Defense Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky also welcomed the change in America’s stance at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting on Feb. 12.

“We share the view that the bloodshed must end as soon as possible, and rather than steps that escalate the situation, efforts should focus on bringing the war to a close,” he stated from Brussels.

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó also applauded the phone conversation between Trump and Putin, calling it a “significant step” toward the hope of ending the war in Ukraine.

Shadow of War

“For three years, we have lived under the shadow of war, hoping for its end,” Szijjártó said. “With [the] call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, we have moved closer to realizing this hope.”

Direct consultation between the United States and Russia soon followed, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Feb. 18.

Szijjártó commended the meeting, which he said could help relaunch cooperation between Russia and the United States while also working toward ending the war in Ukraine. He emphasized that “good U.S.-Russia relations always benefit world security. If there is Russia-U.S. cooperation based on mutual respect that both sides find effective, it makes the world a safer place,” he added.

However, representatives from Ukraine and European allies were noticeably absent from these conversations, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to call an emergency summit of leading European military powers, including the United Kingdom, in Paris on Feb. 17.

Szijjártó slammed those in attendance as being “pro-war, anti-Trump and frustrated,” a group who “want to prevent a Ukraine peace agreement from being reached. Unlike them, we support Donald Trump’s aspirations,” he said. “Unlike them, we support the U.S.-Russian negotiations; unlike them, we want peace in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, the prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán, called the “Paris rendezvous” initiated by the French president “a meeting of losers.” He said that Macron had convened the summit in Paris to discuss “how European leaders, who have been pro-war so far, should react to the peace talks initiated by the U.S. in the face of protests from the European Union.”

The political director added that the prime minister had earlier warned European leaders to draft an independent peace strategy lest Europe lose out on the war once Trump was elected president.

In order to bolster European defense spending, discussions emerged during the Paris summit over a potential joint borrowing mechanism to strengthen European militaries while distributing the fiscal burden, drawing inspiration from the EUR 650 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility established in 2021 to support EU economies post-COVID. However, applying a similar model to defense spending could prove challenging, as some EU member states with closer ties to Russia, notably Hungary and Slovakia, could resist such a scheme.

This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of February 21, 2025.