Orbán to visit White House to try to broker Trump-Putin summit for peace in Ukraine | Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán will visit the White House on Friday as Hungary’s far-right prime minister tries to broker a new summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which Orbán’s advisers claim could help end the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Orbán, who has proposed hosting the summit in Budapest, will also seek exemption from US sanctions on Russian energy, in a major test of Trump’s tougher line on the Kremlin after accusing Putin of slow-moving talks to end the conflict.

But insiders say Orbán’s priority is to persuade Trump to visit Hungary at a time when he faces an unprecedented domestic challenge from a new opposition leader ahead of parliamentary elections in April. His advisers believe Trump’s visit will strengthen Orbán’s statesman role and energize his conservative base.

“Orbán wants Trump to come to Budapest before the elections,” said a source working in the Hungarian government’s foreign policy agency. “This is a priority issue. They will discuss the Russian gas issue, but what Orbán cares about most is the elections.”

Zsuzsanna Végh, political analyst and program officer at the German Marshall Fund, said such a visit would be a “huge political favor” from the US president. Trump notably did not attend all major international events in Budapest, including a number of CPAC conferences.

Orbán, often referred to by his critics as Putin’s Trojan horse in the EU, has been building ties with Trump since his first presidency while also building an international far-right network from South America to Europe. The US president and his entourage have long praised Orbán’s Hungary and portrayed it as a country. model a “to follow”conservative Disneyland”.

Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, told a news conference that Friday’s meeting was “an opportunity for the two heads of state to determine the road map that could lead to a US-Russia meeting and thus to a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement.”

The previous meeting collapsed after Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov took a harsh tone during a phone call with US secretary of state Marco Rubio. Observers said Orbán would likely raise the issue again as he sought to feed Trump’s desire to play the peacemaker in international conflicts around the world.

Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said holding a summit between Trump and Putin, who has been indicted by the international criminal court, would “really curry favor with other European leaders” by seeing Putin “warmly hosted and welcomed in the EU.”

Bergmann added that Orbán has so far played less of a role as a spoiler in Europe since Trump’s re-election, as the administration has worked more closely with other European leaders than expected.

US officials noted that Trump has clearly expressed his desire to cut all of Europe’s energy ties with Russia, and that the US is punishing other countries, such as India, for continuing to buy Russian oil.

But European officials are skeptical about the White House’s intentions. A senior European diplomat says a US demand that Europe halt purchases of Russian oil to impose sanctions against the Kremlin should never come into effect.

“There was no expectation that Hungary or Slovakia would cut energy ties with Russia… and as a result the United States would not need to do anything,” the diplomat said.

Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, told the Guardian on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly that Hungary cutting energy ties with Russia was a “dream world”. Gülyas said last week that Hungary’s goal was to “obtain exemption from US sanctions so that purchases of Russian gas and crude oil can continue steadily.”

After the United States announced sanctions against Russian oil giants Lukoil and Rosneft, observers said the meeting would serve as a litmus test of the administration’s determination to increase pressure on Russia by imposing sanctions abroad.

“The meeting will give us an indication of how seriously Trump takes his efforts to impose sanctions on Russian energy,” Bergmann said. “If it doesn’t come up, then clearly we don’t care… If it’s an important issue, then maybe it’s something that sends a signal that we’re willing to take a tougher stance.”

Orbán and the delegation of ministers, business executives and pro-Orbán influencers, wearing their signature Mega (make Europe great again) hats, are flying this time on a chartered Wizz Air plane. The far-right leader has often been criticized in the past for traveling to football matches and other unofficial events on private jets.

At a press conference in Budapest on Wednesday, Szijjártó described the Trump presidency as the “golden age” of US-Hungary relations, emphasizing: “Everything changed when Donald Trump took office. Hungary is now seen in Washington as a friend rather than an enemy.”

“He definitely wants to benefit politically from the visit, and this is clear from the news on social media,” Végh said. “I don’t remember a recent bilateral meeting that received this much attention on the Internet.

“Whatever the outcome, it will be framed as a great success domestically, with Orbán appearing to be a respected leader internationally,” he added. The campaign of Orbán’s Fidesz party was built in part on the Hungarian leader’s “international influence, which helped divert attention from Fidesz’s domestic governance failures.”

Végh said the real question is whether Orbán can talk to Trump privately. “It would be in Orbán’s interest to show that he can talk to Trump one-on-one,” he said. “Such a meeting could create concern for Ukraine and its international allies.”