US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to meet in Budapest to discuss peace in Ukraine. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán discussed at length in an interview on Friday morning why this is good for every Hungarian family and why it is instructive for the European Union that the event will take place in the Hungarian capital.
However, foreign affairs expert Feledy Botond warns on his community page:"It is not unimportant how the Alaska II meeting in Budapest, i.e. the meeting between Trump and Putin, will go down in history: will it be Yalta 2.0, where two powers agreed on the division of a third country, and will this be linked to the name of the Hungarian capital, or will it be more like the Helsinki Process-style Cold War de-escalation and new cooperation frameworks?"
If all this happens around October 23rd: how will the great powers abandon Ukraine in the same way they abandoned Hungary, and will they do it from Budapest? This is a strong contrast to the memory of the Hungarian Revolution”
Feledy asked the question.
He also said that “according to our current knowledge, neither a European country nor Ukraine will participate in the negotiations, and presumably the host will not be present for the substantive part of the negotiations, as they will be bilateral. This “means that here the former KGB agent, current Russian president, will negotiate with the former real estate magnate, current American president over our heads. Over whose heads? The entire European population, the eastern NATO countries and the Ukrainians, so the directly affected people and their neighbors are not there at the negotiating table,” he explained, meaning that, according to him, “exactly what the Europeans have been trying to avoid from the beginning is happening.”
"In principle, it would not be in the interest of a European country to assist in this, since the European interest is to cut our share from the settlement process, which could only work with the weight of the entire EU. In contrast, the Hungarian step, which seems not to have been agreed upon with our allies (yes, they still are), goes against the European alliance interest," he added.
According to Feledy, this will give Putin the biggest symbolic victory yet again. He will be able to negotiate in an EU and NATO member state, without any of his allies sitting next to the US. He is negotiating in Budapest, which will further help Russia's artificial widening of the Hungarian-Ukrainian gap. It exists naturally, but Russian provocateurs have worked on this order to not only maintain it, but also to increase it if possible.
"Hungarian participation in the International Criminal Court, which was officially terminated due to Netanyahu, is now useful, as Budapest is now the only capital where Putin, suspected of war crimes, is not threatened with arrest."
So this is the Russian president's stomach for Europe at the diplomatic level, for which the Hungarian government is the boxing glove"
– said the foreign affairs expert, who believes that Trump is increasingly openly helping his allies, for which he cites several foreign examples, and according to him, Orbán also “belongs to this circle, he receives presidential assistance.”
According to Feledy,"this is an organic step in Hungarian foreign policy in its own logic," but it is worth waiting for the final outcome of Zelensky's meeting in Washington on Friday.
