BUDAPEST, July 10./TASS/. At its upcoming summit in Vilnius, NATO plans to mobilize military and material resources to avoid defeat in its confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine conflict, Endre Simo, president of the Hungarian Community for Peace, told TASS on Wednesday.

In reply to a TASS inquiry about what impact the summit might have on the Ukraine situation, the expert said: "In NATO, both the tendency to widen the war in the hope of defeating Russia and [the possibility of reaching a] compromise with Russia are present together. But the sound of hawks is still louder [than doves]."

He reiterated that, last year, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that a Russian victory in Ukraine would mean the defeat of the North Atlantic Alliance. "I think that, in Vilnius, the bloc will mobilize greater military and material forces to avoid its failure," the Hungarian expert said.

More about NATO’s plans

Focusing on NATO’s plans, he pointed out that, "the support provided to Ukraine so far has not brought the hoped-for results." That is why, "it is expected that they will increase the arsenal of weapons to be provided to Kiev and expand the range of ‘security guarantees,’" he said. "There is also talk of installing nuclear weapons on the territory of some Eastern European NATO member states bordering Ukraine," Simo stressed.

According to him, "they also plan to allow Poland and the Baltic [states], and possibly others, to send troops to Ukraine." However, member countries of the alliance will make this decision individually. Meanwhile, "It is not clear to them whether Russia would differentiate between the intervention of individual NATO states and the intervention of NATO as a whole," he went on to say.

Hungary’s stance

The summit will, one way or another, discuss the prospects for Ukraine to become a NATO member, which many leaders of alliance member states are openly questioning. In an interview with Sky News on Sunday, Stoltenberg acknowledged that intra-bloc differences exist on this issue, while US President Joe Biden told CNN that Ukraine was not yet ready for NATO membership.

For its part, the Hungarian government has said that Ukraine's accession to NATO was "out of the question," since an armed conflict was in progress there. In addition, Budapest warned that it would block Ukrainian integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions until Kiev restored the rights of the ethnic Hungarian minority in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region. In addition, Hungary still refuses to supply weapons to Ukraine and has come out in favor of achieving a Ukrainian settlement through negotiations.

"Although [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban's peace policy is unique in NATO, it also affects those who are still among the hawks today. Although the Hungarian government has not yet dared to openly support the satisfaction of the Russian security demands put forward on December 15, 2021, Orban and Pope Francis agreed at their meeting in Budapest on April 28, 2023 that peace cannot be created if the Western allies at least partially fail to meet Russian security requirements," the Hungarian expert stressed.

In December 2021, Russia sent the United States and NATO its proposals on security guarantees, which included demands to legally enshrine the alliance's pledge not to expand further eastward and to return its military infrastructure to the alliance’s borders as of 1997. At the end of January 2022, Washington and Brussels gave Moscow their written replies, signaling the West’s refusal to meet Russia’s fundamental requirements.