After meeting with Donald Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said this Sunday that, if the magnate returns to the White House, "he will not give a cent to the war between Ukraine and Russia, so the conflict will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine cannot resist on its own. The leader of the Eastern European country said that Trump is a "man of peace" who could "completely end" this war of attrition, which is stalled after more than two years of conflict.
The Republican magnate has been avoiding focusing on foreign policy in his campaign speeches, but his positions are well known: America First, the flagship motto during his presidency, implies skepticism of the NATO framework and the need to help the allied countries at war. His incendiary statements three weeks ago, in which he said that he would "encourage" Vladimir Putin to "do whatever the hell he wants" with member countries that do not spend enough on defense, provoked the indignation of some congressmen from his party and the President Joe Biden, who in the State of the Union address last Thursday recalled that "Putin is not going to stop in Ukraine."
Orbán said Trump has "a detailed plan" to end the conflict. Something that he has boasted about in his speeches, ensuring that if he is president he will end the war "in 24 hours" thanks to his good relationship with Putin, which he also brags about, and with whom Orbán is in tune and met for the last time in October, with the rejection of European leaders. If so, such an immediate peace would necessarily imply a cession of territory by kyiv.
US aid to Ukraine, 75 billion since the conflict began, has been exhausted and the approval of a new package remains stalled in Congress due to the blockage of the hard wing of the Republicans, close to Trump. Among them, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, who expresses his support for Ukraine, but refuses to keep the tap open in a conflict without clear progress on the battlefield.
Last week, he opened up to presenting his own aid plan, not negotiated with Democrats, consisting of a series of loans that, unlike current assistance, will have to be repaid. He did so following the line of argument of Trump, who published the same day in Truth Social that "money should not be given to any foreign country in the form of foreign aid. It should only be given in the form of a loan and with extremely beneficial conditions." The magnate justified the proposal by assuring that "if the country we help turns against us, or becomes rich in the future, the loan will be paid and the money will be returned to the United States. But we should never again give money without hope." of a refund".
Republicans would put this proposal to a vote after March 22, the scheduled date for the government shutdown if another extension or all of the federal budget laws are not approved first. But it has no signs of succeeding in the Senate: Democrats have already expressed their rejection of this idea, as they believe that aid should be maintained without conditions.
Orbán's visit to the US flouted the diplomatic rule that says the leader of a foreign country should not meet with the incumbent president's opposition candidate. But the guest was an authoritarian leader criticized by Biden and with whom the host was full of praise. "There is no one more prepared, more intelligent and a better leader than Viktor Orban," Trump said after their meeting, and referred to the prime minister as "a controversial figure" because "when he says that something is going to be like this, he does not allow for discussion." .
The meeting had the symbolism of a state visit: both met at the gates of Mar-a-Lago, which acts as Trump's presidential palace, and entered along a red carpet surrounded by US and Hungarian flags. And it was not left without a response from Biden: "Do you know who Trump met today at Mar-a-Lago? With a leader who flatly declared that he does not believe that democracy works and that he is looking for a dictatorship," he said in at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, "I, on the other hand, see a future in which we defend democracy, and not in which we work to end it.
