Budapest believes the ‘victory plan’ proposed by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky poses a major risk of escalation, and will not support it, senior Hungarian official Balazs Orban has said.
On Wednesday, Zelensky made public most of the points in his request to foreign leaders. His list includes an immediate invitation to join NATO, a ramping-up of Western weapons supplies, and support for attacks against Russia. In return, Kiev is offering long-term access to Ukrainian mineral resources and the services of its military to allied nations.
The plan is “the quickest path to World War III,” Balazs Orban, who serves as political director in the office of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (no relation), told journalists on Thursday, on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Brussels.
If Zelensky’s requests are met, the situation will deteriorate, and NATO nations will be dragged into the conflict, an outcome that is “completely unacceptable for Hungary,” the official stressed. He urged other EU members to pursue a peace strategy and diplomatic engagement instead of continuing weapons supplies to Kiev. Prime Minister Orban has called the Ukrainian plan “more than terrifying.”
Another NATO member, Slovakia, previously vowed to obstruct Kiev’s candidacy for as long as Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico remains in power. Bratislava shares Budapest’s skeptical view on the way the US and Brussels are handling the crisis.
On the same day, Zelensky promoted his ideas to senior European officials, taking part in a European Council summit. Following the event, he said at a press conference that if his nation is not invited to NATO, the only other viable way to defend itself would be nuclear weapons.
He later denied that Kiev intends to obtain a nuclear arsenal, after German tabloid Bild reported that a senior Ukrainian official previously bragged to it that Kiev has the materials to make an atomic device in “several weeks” if it chose to do so.
The Zelensky government has for months been seeking permission to strike targets deep inside Russia with Western-donated long-range weapons, a request that he listed in his ‘victory plan’. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Moscow would consider any such attack to be coming from the nation providing the military capability.