Several European Union sources at El País have privately described the planned meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Budapest as a"political nightmare."
EU officials are concerned because they see the choice of location as a humiliation for Europe. The EU has worked continuously to isolate Russia since the outbreak of the war, adopting a total of 18 sanctions packages to weaken the Russian economy. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, however, has sought to hinder this work from the beginning, obstructing the adoption of sanctions and attacking EU foreign policy whenever he could.
One EU diplomat said the location was “carefully chosen.” He said it “could benefit Russia by deepening the rifts within the EU over the Kremlin. And it could also do Orbán a huge favor, as he runs for election next year.”
The European Commission is taking a pragmatic view of the meeting for now. A Commission spokesperson said on Friday that the meetings do not always take place in the desired order and format, but if they bring us closer to a just and lasting peace, they should be welcomed.
The US president posted on October 16 that he might meet with the Russian president in Budapest. We wrote about the possible outcomes of the summit in this article, and we summarized its possible domestic political effects in this one.
