If there has been a spoiler at this week’s carefully curated Nato summit, then it is Viktor Orbán, the conservative Hungarian prime minister who has enraged his Nato allies by meeting with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping en route to Washington in what he has called his “peace mission”.
Now on Thursday the Hungarian PM is planning to fly to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump, a source close to Orbán told the Guardian, as he seeks to negotiate a peace deal without consulting other EU nations or the Biden administration. By contrast, he has effectively shunned Joe Biden at this week’s Nato summit and did not request a bilateral meeting with the US president, according to three sources familiar with the summit preparations.
The Hungarian PM has been quietly seeking to negotiate a settlement to the Ukraine war with an eye to a Trump re-election. Trump’s lead in the presidential polls has been bolstered by Biden’s blundering debate performance and questions about his mental acuity and age.
Orbán, who also met with Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv earlier this month, has sought to have Ukraine and Russia sit down in direct negotiations, talks that Zelenskiy has ruled out in the past.
Bloomberg News late on Wednesday evening reported that Ukraine was considering new peace talks that would include meetings with Russian officials, as well as a potential meeting between Trump and Orbán at Mar-a-Lago, where the two would discuss Orbán’s recent discussions with Putin and Zelenskiy.
And Orbán could use Hungary’s current control of the European Council presidency to claim he is negotiating on behalf of other EU nations, according to insiders in Budapest, Brussels and both campaigns in Washington, including with a potential president-elect Trump.
Orbán shared only a curt handshake with the US president on stage on Wednesday, a day after meeting with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who he said led “the only country that has successfully acted as a mediator between the warring parties in the Russian-Ukrainian war”.
