Hungary wants to stay out of the Russia-Ukraine war and does not want to participate in the NATO mission in Ukraine either, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office said on Thursday. Gergely Gulyás told a government press briefing that the government would make every effort to ensure that Hungarian soldiers and weaponry would not be sent to Ukraine.
The government maintains its position that the war cannot be resolved on the battlefield and NATO should focus all its efforts on activating an immediate ceasefire and starting peace talks as soon as possible, he added. He said at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting the war situation was evaluated as having taken a more serious turn. New details revealed about NATO’s plans carried the risk of the alliance intervening directly in the war, he added. The Government Information Centre (KTK) will send a „factual report” on war-related developments to members of the public, he added.
Gulyás said NATO’s Ukraine mission would involve military training and the coordination of weapon deliveries, as well as 100 billion US dollars of spending on the war in the next five years. The expectation that the war may last another five years was reason for concern in itself, he said, but the expectation that all NATO members should participate and „massive pressure” on Hungary to support the alliance’s plans were even more worrying, he said.
Gulyás said NATO may consider a member state to be under attack in the absence of an actual conflict on the ground if it were „directly threatened”. Such „moves and plans” had been mobilised, he said. He said that at the same time Hungary, as „a loyal ally”, would work to keep NATO from at all intervening in the conflict. Failing that, Hungary would do everything in its power to stay out of any future military missions in Ukraine, he said.
Gulyás said Hungary was a loyal NATO ally and among those countries to have raised defence spending to 2% of GDP. He said that at the same time „peace must be served”, and the government was developing the Hungarian armed forces with a view to guaranteeing the security of its own citizens and NATO as a whole, he said, adding that investments in defence were not about engaging „in missions that threaten to trigger a world war between nuclear powers”. Gulyás said the alliance’s leadership was likely to work towards a compromise before its meeting in Washington, DC over the summer.
He said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was considering whether to participate in a peace summit to be held in Switzerland in mid-June at the initiative of the Ukrainian president. He said a peace summit without both warring parties present „would have not much point”, adding that progress could not be made before the parties sat down and negotiated a ceasefire. He added that he saw no chance off Orbán and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meeting before the European parliamentary elections.
Concerning the preconditions Ukraine must meet before joining the EU, Gulyás said the Hungarian government expected Ukraine to restore the situation prior to 2015 in respect of the ethnic Hungarian minority and the legal status of minority schools, the option to take secondary school final examinations in Hungarian, and using the Hungarian language in higher education, culture, public administration and social life without restrictions. Failing to meet those criteria, Ukraine could not make real progress in its accession talks, Gulyás added. He said Hungary supported Ukraine as the victim of the Russian attack but not by sending weapons to the country or by contributing to „prolonging the war in any way”.
Regarding aid to Ukraine, he said graft was „a serious problem”, adding it was up to the EU to establish a system to monitor the funds sent there.
Answering a question, he said that in times of war it may be valid to seize the assets of those believed to share responsibility for the war and spend the frozen funds appropriately, but „seizing the assets of a person just because they are Russian evokes the worst of pre-second-world-war times.”