BUDAPEST, July 5. /TASS/. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has rejected EU leaders’ criticism about his visit to Moscow, where he discussed prospects for the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to the Hungarian prime minister, the EU bureaucracy has done nothing to promote the normalization between the conflicting sides.
European Council President Charles Michel and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that Orban has no EU mandate to hold talks with Russia. They stressed that Hungary’s presidency of the EU Council gives it no right to speak on behalf of the entire union. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also slammed Orban’s visit, saying that appeasement won’t work with Putin and only unity and resoluteness can stop him.
"This Brussels bureaucratic absurdity has yielded no results in terms of looking for ways to peace in the Russian-Ukrainian war. If we want to put an end to the war, we need a political approach rather than bureaucratic one," he wrote on his X page.
Earlier, the Hungarian prime minister said that his country was not seeking to speak on behalf of the entire European Union but was acting independently on a peacekeeping mission in the interests of ending the conflict in Ukraine. He stressed that this was his position concerning both his visit to Kiev on July 2 and to Moscow on July 5.