US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to visit Budapest

After attending the 62nd Munich Security Conference between February 13 to 15, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will travel to Bratislava (Slovakia) and Budapest (Hungary) on 15-16 February, an official statement released by the US State Department on Monday announced.

According to the statement, while in Budapest, Rubio will meet with Hungarian officials to reaffirm the two countries' shared bilateral and regional interests, including their commitment to peace processes aimed at resolving global conflicts, as well as the energy partnership between the United States and Hungary.

They also wrote that Rubio will be meeting with members of the Slovak government in Bratislava to promote shared regional security interests, strengthen bilateral cooperation on nuclear energy and the diversification of energy sources, and support Slovakia's military modernization and NATO commitments.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump discussed Hungary's dependence on Russian energy over the phone in September, and at the time, it seemed that the Hungarian Prime Minister had managed to convince the US President not to punish Hungary for not divesting itself from Russian energy imports.

Then, in November, Orbán traveled to Washington DC with a large delegation to meet with the US president. After the Orbán-Trump meeting, the Prime Minister announced that the United States would grant Hungary full exemption from the US sanctions on Russian oil and natural gas with regard to the Turkish Stream and Friendship pipelines, as well as that Hungary would purchase fuel from the US company Westinghouse, in addition to its commitment to introduce small American modular reactors in Hungary.

However, a discrepancy arose over the duration of the exemption after the Hungarian government insisted that it would remain in effect as long as Orbán was the Hungarian prime minister and Trump was the US president. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said that the exemption is valid for an unlimited period, while CNN, citing a White House official, reported that Donald Trump had exempted Hungary from US sanctions on Russian oil and gas purchases for one year. The same was reported by BBC sources and Reuters, and then US Secretary of State Marco Rubio effectively refuted the entire Fidesz narrative about the time limit on the exemption with half a sentence.

We summarized the results of the Orbán-Trump summit in this article. Incidentally, Orbán announced over the weekend that he will be traveling to the United States again in two weeks, as Donald Trump had invited him to the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace.