Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban meets Trump at Mar-a-Lago for ‘Peace Mission 5.0’
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has met with former US President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida where the pair discussed the “possibilities of peace”, the latest stop in Orban’s solo run to secure a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Orban, a longtime Trump supporter, has visited Kyiv, Moscow and Beijing in the past two weeks on a self-styled “peace mission”, which has angered Hungary’s NATO allies.
Orban’s so-called peace initiative has irked many members of the European Union, whose rotating presidency Hungary took over at the start of this month.
Considered the closest European leader to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Orban was in the United States this week to attend a NATO summit hosted by President Joe Biden.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday that Hungary believes a second Trump presidency would boost hopes for peace in Ukraine, and that Orban hoped to bring an end to the war through peace talks involving both Russia and Ukraine.
Trump has said he would quickly end the war, and advisers to the former president are reported to have presented him with a plan to end the conflict by, in part, making future US aid to Kyiv conditional on Ukraine joining peace talks.
Orban’s meeting in Moscow last week with the Russian president in particular has vexed some NATO members, who said the trip handed legitimacy to Putin when the West wants to isolate him over his invasion of Ukraine.
Orban had travelled to Kyiv before visiting Moscow.
