Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban met with President Vladimir V. Putin in the Kremlin on Friday, a rare trip to Russia by a Western leader that quickly sparked discord in the European Union.
Orban made the trip three days after visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Ukrainian capital of kyiv. And it was the same week that Hungary assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, prompting other European leaders to quickly declare that Orban did not represent them in Moscow.
A spokesman for Orban, Zoltan Kovacs, said the Hungarian leader was in Moscow “as part of his peace mission.”
But Putin, in his televised comments to Orban at the start of their meeting, signaled that he was not going to back away from the sweeping demands he made of Ukraine last month. At the time, Putin said Russia would be willing to agree to a ceasefire only if Ukraine withdrew its troops from the four regions Moscow has claimed as its own and abandoned its aspirations to join NATO.
“Our positions on the possibility of a peace agreement are outlined there,” Putin told Orban, referring to those demands. “Of course, I am ready to discuss and explain to you the various nuances.”
Orban, who has long been disapproved of in Europe for his support for far-right politicians and authoritarians like Putin, has said he wants to promote peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian leaders have rejected talks with Russia because they say Putin would only seek their country’s capitulation.
This is the first time that an EU leader has visited Russia to meet Putin officially since the first months of the invasion of Ukraine. Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer made the trip in April 2022.
It was Orban’s second meeting with Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He last met the Russian leader in October in Beijing, telling him that Hungary “never wanted to confront Russia” and “has always been eager to expand contacts.”
His visit was apparently a last-minute affair. It was not announced in advance and Dmitri S. Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told Russian state television that Hungary had proposed Orban’s visit just two days before his arrival.
Orban, who has won four consecutive elections by portraying his domestic rivals as traitors and warmongers subservient to Brussels, revels in defying his nominal allies in the European Union and NATO, who will hold a summit in Washington next week.
He presents himself as a maverick in the style of former President Donald J. Trump, a lonely defender of national interests who takes no account of the opinion of the establishment.
“I am very grateful,” Orban told Putin on Friday, according to a Russian translation of his televised remarks, “that you have agreed to receive me, even under such difficult conditions.”
His trip to Moscow, in defiance of the European Union’s policy of shunning Putin, fits into a long pattern of Hungarian disdain for Europe’s faltering efforts to forge a joint foreign policy.
In recent months, Orban’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, has repeatedly reached out to autocratic nations that Brussels keeps at a distance. He has traveled to Belarus, which has been hit with severe European sanctions, and to Iran, which also has frosty relations with Europe and is also subject to sanctions.
On Friday, Szjijjarto posted a photo of himself on the red carpet at a Moscow airport, in front of a Hungarian Air Force plane. “Arrival in Moscow. Another step towards peace!” he said.
Aside from some vague public statements calling for a “time-bound ceasefire” during his visit to kyiv on Tuesday, Orban has shed no light on how he sees a possible peace in Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia are not known to have held direct peace negotiations since spring 2022, when weeks of intense talks broke down as both sides dug in on the battlefield. But they have occasionally addressed specific issues, such as prisoner exchanges; each side released 75 prisoners of war on May 31 after several months without such exchanges.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Friday to reiterate that Orban made his trip to Moscow “without approval or coordination with Ukraine.”
Russia was not invited to a recent summit in Switzerland aimed at bolstering support for Ukraine’s negotiating positions, but Zelensky has raised the possibility that the Kremlin could be invited to the next international meeting hosted by kyiv.
Orban’s trip was doubly provocative because Hungary this week assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, a largely clerical role with little real power but one that puts the country holding the office for six months in the spotlight.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he had no prior knowledge of Orban’s trip and noted that he did not represent the European Union.
Josep Borrell Fontelles, the bloc’s top diplomat, issued a statement saying that Orban’s “visit to Moscow takes place exclusively within the framework of bilateral relations between Hungary and Russia.”
The Hungarian prime minister “does not represent” the European Union “in any way,” Borrell added.
When news of Orban’s quietly planned trip (which was not announced until after his plane landed in Moscow on Friday) spread on Thursday, other European Union officials were quick to condemn it.
“The rotating EU presidency has no mandate to engage in dialogue with Russia on behalf of the EU,” said Charles Michel, president of the European Council, the body representing the heads of government of member states.
“The European Council is clear: Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine is the victim,” Michel said on social media. “You cannot talk about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk addressed Orban directly in a social media post: “The rumours about your visit to Moscow can’t be true, can they?”
Poland’s former ruling party, Law and Justice, a nationalist force that for years backed Orban in his battles with Brussels over immigration and other issues, has also expressed dismay at Hungary’s rapprochement with the Kremlin.
In an interview on Thursday, Poland’s conservative former prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki expressed alarm at Orban’s friendly policy towards Russia and what he described as Hungary’s “peace mantra”.
This, he said, has made Law and Justice reluctant to join a new Hungarian-led alliance in the European Parliament called Patriots for Europe, despite having shared views on many other issues.
“Ukraine is a Rubicon, a kind of red line for us,” Morawiecki said. “Russia must not win this war.”
Morawiecki, who traveled to kyiv to show his support just days after the Russian invasion, said he was encouraged by Orban’s belated visit to Ukraine this week as it was a sign that the Hungarian leader was moderating his previous hostility toward President Zelensky. Poland, he said, shares Hungary’s desire for a peace deal, but not one based on Ukraine’s defeat.
“Who doesn’t want peace?” he said. “But the quickest way to end a war is to lose it,” he added, insisting that this was not an option anyone wanted for Ukraine, except Russia.
Nearly all Western leaders have avoided meeting Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine, seeking instead to isolate him on the world stage.
Outside the West, however, leaders have not been shy about sitting down with their Russian counterparts: Xi Jinping, the leader of China, met with Putin this week in Kazakhstan, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is scheduled to visit Moscow next week.
Christopher F. Schuetze and Marc Santora Contributed reporting.
