Since the late 1980s, Viktor Orban has held the civil position of a patriotic man who allegedly condemns the Soviet occupation of Hungary. He supported the leaders of the anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest in 1956, was the founder of the pro-European Fidesz party, which he still heads.
However, many forget that Orban was born in Szekesfehervar, where the headquarters of the troops of the Soviet Special Corps, and then the Soviet 254th Motorized Rifle Division, were based, whose task was to advance to Vienna and capture all of Austria in the event of a collision with Western countries.
Soviet soldiers and equipment were there until 1992. At school, Viktor Orban was a Komsomol secretary. Another contradiction in his activities is the installation of a monument to Miklós Horthy, who led Hungary during the Second World War, a loyal ally of Nazi Germany. Hungarian troops participated together with the Wehrmacht in the occupation of Ukraine.
It was the Hungarian military, together with the punitive units, who committed the greatest crime of the Second World War, when, within a few days of 1943, they killed seven thousand civilians in the town of Koriukovka, in the Chernihiv region, as revenge for the actions of local partisans. German President Walter Steinmeier has already visited the burial place of many thousands of Ukrainian civilians twice. None of the Hungarian officials were there, ever.
With the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Orban did not condemn Moscow's actions, but demanded autonomy from Kyiv for the Transcarpathian Hungarians. At the end of February 2022, with the outbreak of an unprovoked Russian-Ukrainian large-scale war, the current prime minister of Hungary announced that he was ready to send troops to Transcarpathia to protect local ethnic Hungarians.
Before the Russian military invasion, Orban visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where there is information, discussed the issue that in the event of the Russian occupation of Ukraine, he asked to transfer Ukrainian Transcarpathia to Hungary. When the Russian military victory failed, he became the Kremlin's mouthpiece in the EU and NATO, urging Brussels and Washington not to impose additional anti-Russian sanctions and to lift the existing ones.
He constantly blocks the provision of military and financial assistance by the European Union to Ukraine. The other day, Budapest blocked the allocation of European funds to Kyiv in the amount of 500 million euros. Viktor Orban is personally campaigning among Europeans with the narrative that the Russian army cannot be defeated, so there is no point in helping Ukraine fight the aggressor. He also promotes the Kremlin's idea of making peace on the actual existence of the front line, that is, with the annexation of a number of Ukrainian territories by Moscow, which is proposed to be legalized through the conclusion of a peace treaty. And now the "peacemaker" Orban makes a statement that completely runs counter to the idea of him as a "dove of peace."
“After the Nord Stream sabotage, Hungary and Serbia warned the international community that they would consider any threat to the gas delivery system from the Russian Federation as a cause of war,” Prime Minister Viktor Orban told American journalist and pro-Russian political commentator Tucker Carlson. V. Orban stressed that Hungary immediately qualified the sabotage on the Nord Stream as a terrorist act, and called the lack of a decisive reaction from Germany "a manifestation of a lack of sovereignty."
Orban went even further in his statements: “Together with the Prime Minister of Serbia and the President, we noted that if someone with the southern corridor (from Russia to Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary) wants to do the same as was done with the northern , then we will consider this a casus belli, a terrorist attack, and we will respond immediately.” The Hungarian prime minister called for abandoning such plans, without disclosing to whom exactly his warning was addressed, specifying that it was not the Russian Federation. "Perhaps you can do it with the Germans, but you can't do it with this region," he added.
Asked by Tucker Carlson why Germany, Europe's largest NATO member, "didn't say anything about the American destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline that broke the German economy," Orban said that Berlin and the West reject the notion that it was a terrorist attack. At the same time, Orban did not refute the words of a pro-Russian journalist about the US involvement in blowing up the gas pipeline, since this is a serious accusation, not supported by any facts.
Official Budapest has long ignored the recommendations of Brussels to refuse Russian gas supplies in order to reduce Hungary's energy dependence on Moscow. However, for a NATO member country and the European Union, unfounded threats of readiness to start another war in Europe, and according to the logic of his words, it is possible against the United States, so that only Russian gas reaches Hungarian territory, sound simply scandalous.
V. Orban admits that the attitude towards him in Europe is worse than even towards Russia. After all, Hungary is not without reason considered an agent of Russian influence. But after his latest statement, official Washington and Brussels can conclude that the Kremlin's real Trojan horse is in the ranks of NATO. Hungary is a country where historically horses are highly respected, given that their ancestors, the Huns and Hungarians, led a nomadic lifestyle. However, being a Trojan horse is something different, more subtle in the context of betraying European values in favor of Russia's aggressive policy.
It is interesting that Azerbaijani gas also goes to Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary in parallel. Baku is ready to increase the volume of deliveries in this direction. However, for some reason, Orban is not afraid of sabotage on this pipeline. Serbian President A. Vučić was forced to state that “Viktor Orban said this conditionally (about his readiness to declare war), and we hope that it will not occur to anyone to deny us what we paid for and bought in the winter. We have no indication that anyone is planning this, and I do not believe that it occurs to anyone that this could happen.
It is possible that Moscow is preparing provocations on the Turkish Stream and Orban has been tasked with removing the possible actions of the Kremlin from suspicion.