Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, will tell Nato leaders that President Putin is ready to hold peace talks and is “surprised” that Ukraine has rejected calls for a temporary ceasefire.
According to a confidential letter he wrote to other European Union leaders and leaked to Ukraine’s European Pravda newspaper, Orban urges negotiations “due to the fact that diplomatic channels are closed and there is no direct dialogue between the parties”.
Orban, who has been accused of appeasement after flying to Moscow and then Beijing following a meeting in Kyiv last week, will discuss his controversial shuttle diplomacy at the Nato summit which begins on Tuesday in Washington.
“Time is running out due to the escalation of hostilities and the rapid increase in the number of human casualties,” he wrote. “If we cannot stop this process, then in the next two months we will witness more dramatic losses and military events on the front than ever before.”
Russia and China, now with Orban’s help, are trying to revive the terms of peace talks held in Turkey in March 2022, which were rejected by Ukraine because Moscow would become one of the guarantors of Kyiv’s security, even after the invasion.
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The Orban peace plan additionally does not insist on Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty while noting that the besieged country’s “monthly losses … have increased even more in recent weeks.”
“That is why [Putin] was surprised that the Ukrainian president rejected the proposal for a temporary ceasefire,” Orban wrote in his letter, after his call for an end to the fighting while standing alongside President Zelensky in Kyiv last week.
Hungary, Putin’s sole ally in Europe, holds the rotating EU presidency and Orban has used the opportunity to pursue peace talks, emulating, so Budapest claims, Nicolas Sarkozy’s peace mission to Russia in 2008 after Russia’s invasion of Georgia.
“You have to look at the reality,” he told the media outlets of the German Axel Springer group.
“Putin can’t lose, if you consider the number of soldiers, the equipment and the technology … It is in moral terms a very difficult situation when you are getting the news every day that thousands of your compatriots are dying in a war.
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“Even if both leaders are logically inclined to oppose a quick ceasefire, fundamentally everybody knows that it would be better if from tomorrow morning no Russians and no Ukrainians would die.”
Harking back to the days before the Ukraine war began in February 2022, when Germany and much of Europe were dependent on Russian gas, Orban said Putin would not have begun the full-scale invasion had Angela Merkel still been in power.
“She had the ability, the nous and the skills to isolate conflicts that are bad for Europe,” Orban said. “We made the mistake that there’s a conflict, that there’s a war. And instead of isolating it, we escalated it and made it ever more international.”
Despite appearing to blame Europe for worsening the conflict, in his letter to European leaders he rejected as “groundless” criticism that he was misrepresenting himself by making “proposals or expressing an opinion on behalf of the EU”.
Before heading to what will be a difficult Nato summit in Washington, Orban turned up in Beijing on Monday, after a flying visit to see Putin in Moscow on Friday and meeting Zelensky last Tuesday in Kyiv.
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Orban, who has resisted but not blocked supplies of weapons to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia, has backed China’s stance that outside powers should intervene to bring peace with or without Ukraine’s support.
EU diplomats fear that his initiative will set the scene for Donald Trump, who is close to Orban, to try to force a deal on Ukraine if he becomes American president for a second term.
“The international community should create conditions and provide assistance for the two sides to resume direct dialogue and negotiations,” President Xi told Orban on Monday, according to Chinese state media. “Only when all major powers exert positive energy rather than negative energy can the dawn of a ceasefire in this conflict appear as soon as possible.”
