'We don't have to accept what the Russians are saying, but they really do see this as just a special military operation' – Balázs Orbán

There is no point in hundreds of people dying each day on the front lines for territories that will – hopefully as soon as possible – be allocated to one side or the other in treaties drawn up by men in suits – this was one of the points made by Balázs Orbán, (no relation to the PM) the Hungarian Prime Minister's political director and Fidesz's campaign manager during a panel discussion held on Tuesday evening in Budapest, after the screening of the documentary entitled Ominous Proximity (Baljós Közelség), about Ukraine and the situation of ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia.

According to a report by the Hungarian State News Agency (MTI), speaking at a gathering held at the Uránia National Film Theater, Orbán said that Hungary is neutral in the Ukrainian-Russian war, which is why it does not want to give up cheap Russian energy, "even if this would be good for the Ukrainians." In his view, doing so would be detrimental to us "No one can ask us to help others by bringing ruin upon ourselves, so even if they blackmail us, we will not be decoupling from Russian energy," he said.

The European Council and the European Parliament both made a decision last December on the phasing out of Russian liquefied natural gas by the end of 2026 and the complete ban on pipe-delivered natural gas starting in autumn 2027. The legislation on this was finally adopted in January this year by the Council of the European Union, with Hungary and Slovakia voting against it. Already at its March 2022 meeting, the European Council stated that "the European Union will gradually, as quickly as possible, end its dependence on Russian gas, oil, and coal imports." At the time, this was also agreed to by Viktor Orbán on behalf of Hungary.

The Prime Minister's political advisor now also explained that according to him, the Ukrainian elite seems to have found a breakthrough point with the war. He believes that seeing the business model built on Western aid and the way the state functions, this is going to be a very long and bloody war.

"We don't have to accept what the Russians are saying, but they really do see this as just a special military operation taking place on the periphery of an empire. They have the cold ruthlessness to achieve their goals no matter what it takes, regardless of how many lives it costs," he said.

In his view, the Ukrainian leadership would like to compensate Ukrainians for "the immense suffering, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the vast territorial losses, and the devastated country" with EU membership.

Knowing "the dangers of organized crime and the system governing the functioning of the state, it is in our fundamental interest as Hungarians not to be part of a political and economic community with them," he said. In his view, providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine is important, but “in this situation, permitting EU membership along our eastern borders would amount to betrayal, and therefore must be prevented by all means, otherwise everything that is there will engulf us as well.”

In October 2024, speaking to the pro-government Mandiner, Balázs Orbán said that “based on 1956, we probably would not have done what Zelensky did, who led his country into a war of defense.” Explaining away this statement gave Fidesz some serious headaches, but in the end, they settled on the narrative that the events of 1956 should not be compared to the war in Ukraine. However, according to historian Krisztián Ungváry, there is one thing that the two events definitely have in common: in both cases, it was the desire for national independence and freedom facing off against repression by force.

Viktor Orbán has also spoken about the similarities he sees between the Russian-Ukrainian war and the events of 1956 in Hungary. More than six months after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, he compared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Imre Nagy, (PM of the revolutionary Hungarian government in 1956) who was executed after the revolution. At an event in Berlin in 2022, he said that Hungarians are the ones who best understand the Ukrainian position, and then he compared Budapest in 1956 to Bucha in Ukraine, where hundreds of civilians were massacred by Russian occupiers in 2022.

The operation launched by the Russians on February 24, 2022, officially called a "special military operation" (abbreviated as SMO in Russian), has been going on for exactly four years.