“Half a year ago, no one wanted to hear about peace, but today, everyone is talking about it. We have opened the door and meaningful negotiations can now begin,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said, calling this the outgoing Hungarian EU Presidency’s greatest achievement.
In an interview with Hungarian public broadcaster Kossuth Rádió on Friday, December 13th, the prime minister detailed Hungary’s active diplomatic push to achieve a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia on Christmas but said that only Russia had accepted the terms.
“There are still several days until Christmas. We hope the situation may change,” Orbán said, adding that the possibility for a mass prisoner exchange and a Christmas ceasefire is still “on the table.”
Hungary has used the six-month rotating EU presidency, which comes to an end in a few weeks, to promote peace and strive for a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, who have been waging a war since Russia’s invasion almost three years ago.
At the beginning of the presidency in July, Orbán visited Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing, and Washington D.C. to talk to both parties in the war, as well as the major global powers that could influence the outcome of the war. He was harshly criticised by many of his European counterparts for holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but the Hungarian prime minister has maintained that there is no hope for the fighting to end without dialogue.
As the Hungarian presidency draws to a close, Orbán took off for another peace mission, visiting U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in Florida on Monday, Pope Francis in the Vatican on Wednesday, and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday.
All three actors are significant in terms of achieving a long-lasting peace. Trump has vowed to end the war as soon as possible once he enters office in January; the pope has been the only European leader aside from Orbán to call for peace since the outset of the war; and Erdoğan was instrumental in brokering the 2022 grain deal that allowed for Ukrainian grain to be safely exported to other parts of the world.
While some European states remain hawkish, they are faced with a daunting reality: Russian troops have been occupying large swathes of Ukrainian territory in recent months, and the election of Donald Trump to the White House could mean that the U.S. will pull its financial and military support for Kyiv, meaning Europe would have to fund Ukraine alone.
After meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a few days ago, Trump called for an immediate ceasefire and for negotiations to begin.
Viktor Orbán is on the same page as Trump, and his efforts to achieve a Christmas ceasefire and a major exchange of prisoners of war—a proposal he made in a call to Vladimir Putin on Wednesday—were received positively by Moscow, but outright rejected by Kyiv.
“The Russian side fully supports Orbán’s efforts aimed at finding a peaceful settlement and resolving humanitarian issues related to the prisoner exchange,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
However, Volodymyr Zelensky criticised the Hungarian leader for undermining Western unity. He said “real peace and guaranteed security” requires involvement from the U.S. and Europe as well as “the commitment of all partners to uphold the goals and principles of the UN Charter.”
In a potential peace deal, Moscow would want to retain the areas it has occupied—large swathes of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, as well as the Crimea, which it annexed ten years ago—and also get guarantees that Ukraine would never become a member of NATO. Kyiv, on the other hand, would only accept a deal in exchange for NATO security guarantees and continued weapons deliveries from the West.
On Thursday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk shot down speculation that European countries were preparing to deploy thousands of troops to Ukraine as part of a potential ceasefire deal to end the war with Russia.
According to Polish newspaper reports, French President Emmanuel Macron had apparently travelled to Warsaw on Thursday to discuss a proposal of sending a 40,000-strong peacekeeping force, but Tusk told reporters that, “for the moment nothing like that is planned.”
Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has warned the citizens of NATO member states that they should “accept to make sacrifices” such as cuts to their pensions, and health and security systems in order to boost defence spending and ensure long-term security in Europe.
To protect our freedom, our prosperity and our way of life, your politicians need to listen to your voices. Tell them you accept to make sacrifices today so that we can stay safe tomorrow.
The former Dutch prime minister called on the alliance to “shift to a wartime mindset” and “turbocharge” defence production and defence spending. He warned that the 2% of GDP most NATO allies spend on defence is not enough in the long term to deter potential adversaries.
