Orbán: In 1999, Clinton asked Hungary to attack Serbia

At a meeting of Fidesz's Digital Civic Circles in Szombathely over the weekend, Viktor Orbán claimed that when the war in Kosovo intensified in 1999, during his first term as prime minister, he received a call from the then US president. Bill Clinton asked Hungary to open a second front and attack Serbia, or "at least shoot at them from Hungary through Vojvodina (northern Serbia) all the way up to Belgrade," Orbán said in Szombathely.

However, Orbán’s government rejected this, and they responded to the American president's explicit request with a "No, sir!" "If, at that time, we had had a prime minister who only knew how to say 'Yes, sir,' we would have been up to our necks in war," Orbán concluded.

According to the Prime Minister, he asked Clinton what would happen in such a situation to the 300,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Vojvodina. He claimed to have also warned Clinton that if shots were fired from one location, there would be shots fired in return, and then "should we allow the city of Szeged to be shot up, is that the plan? Or Hódmezővásárhely and Makó?" Viktor Orbán said that they had agreed to discuss the question in person at the NATO summit scheduled for a week later, but the Americans never brought up the issue again, Orbán claims now.

"It's possible to say no when you have the guts to do so,"

he said, summarizing his point to the audience in Szombathely. According to him, in a few years' time, diplomatic history will describe how, through what channels, and with what information they reached the American president and convinced him not to make such a request ever again.

Áron Tábor, an expert on the US and a lecturer at the Institute of Political and International Studies at Eötvös Lóránd University reacted to the PM's words on his microblog, noting that although initially, there were indeed some plans for a NATO ground operation in 1999 during the Kosovo War, it lacked real political support, and there is no evidence that Hungary would have had to attack Serbia.

Tábor also said that at the very beginning of the bombing of Yugoslavia, Bill Clinton ruled out the possibility of a ground operation in order to minimize American and allied casualties. There was talk of a possible ground operation among politicians in Europe at the time, and the Washington Post also floated such plans, but according to contemporary press reports, NATO leaders always categorically denied that they were planning a ground operation against Yugoslavia. Tábor also recalls that at the time, Viktor Orbán himself reported to Parliament that NATO members considered a ground operation so unnecessary that it was not even put on the agenda at the NATO summit.

By contrast, Viktor Orbán had already talked about this in 2024, when he said that “they” wanted to drag Hungary into the war, but he did not allow it. Orbán's Serbian ally, Aleksandar Vučić, had previously claimed in 2022 that, to his knowledge, Clinton had asked Orbán to attack Serbia in 1999.