BUDAPEST, November 10. /TASS/. Even though the European Union sought to contain the conflict in Ukraine, the United States pushed for its escalation in an attempt to make it global, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Kossuth radio.
He made the remarks when asked to comment on the recent interview by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder published the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, where Schroeder said Ukraine had refused to sign a peace treaty with Russia at the Istanbul talks in March 2022 because of a US interdiction.
"What the former German chancellor said is a well-known fact in the world of diplomacy," Orban stated.
"We know from all sorts of reports and intelligence sources that an agreement was essentially reached in Istanbul between the Russians and Ukrainians, which the Ukrainians did not sign on the orders from the Americans," the prime minister said.
He added that someday this information will become public knowledge.
"Historians will learn about it one day," Orban said.
He recalled the Minsk agreements that were concluded in 2015 with the aim of settling the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and said the EU's approach then was as follows: "This is a conflict between the two Slavic peoples of Russia and Ukraine. It should be isolated, and we will help with its settlement."
"But the Americans stepped in the game, and the path that has been taken since then was not to contain, not to bring it under control, but to expand and escalate the conflict, which is becoming ever more global," Orban said.
According to the Hungarian prime minister, "more and more people are being sent to the front, more and more weapons are being supplied, more and more money is being spent" on military aid to Ukraine. "Hungary did not support transferring arms, and I do not support the provision of Hungarian taxpayers' money" to buy weapons for the Ukrainian army, the prime minister added.
"We are happy to help because we are a Christian country and we should help, but we do not want to support the Ukrainian state in the fight with weapons that we would pay for," Orban said.