On Saturday, Viktor Orbán was in Băile Tușnad, in a region of Romania with a large ethnic Hungarian population, to take part in the annual Bálványos Free Summer University and Student Camp for supporters of his ruling Fidesz party.
During a speech, he condemned what he called the wrong policies of the European Union, the whole West and the Polish government towards Russia.
“Poles are conducting hypocritical policies. They criticize us for our relations with the Russians, and they themselves conduct business with Russia through intermediaries. I have never seen such hypocrisy on the part of the state,” Radio Europa Libera Romania, the Romanian-language subsidiary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, quoted Orbán as saying.
“We do not do business with Russia, unlike Prime Minister Orbán, who is on the margins of international society – both in the European Union and NATO,” Poland’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Władyslaw Teofil Bartoszewski said on Sunday in reaction to the Hungarian prime minister's words.
“Why doesn’t [Orbán] create a Union with Putin and some authoritarian states of this type? If you don’t want to be a member of a club, you can always leave,” Bartoszewski said and added:
“I don’t really understand why Hungary wants to remain a member of organizations that it doesn’t like so much and which supposedly treat it so badly.”
Bartoszewski also said that Orbán’s policy is currently anti-EU, anti-Ukrainian and anti-Polish, referring to Orbán blocking large sums of money that the EU would otherwise pay Poland to refund Warsaw for military equipment transferred to Ukraine.
“There used to be a saying ‘Pole and Hungarian brothers be’ but this is a big family row,” he said, adding that Orbán’s speech was also commented on very negatively by the U.S. ambassador to Budapest on Sunday “because it was an attack on Poland, the U.S., the European Union and NATO.”
Orbán also accused Poland of causing a change in the balance of power in Europe by weakening the Berlin-Paris axis in favor of a new configuration: London, Warsaw, Kyiv, the Baltic states and Scandinavian countries.
This, according to him, weakens the Visegrád Group, a block of four Central European countries including also Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which was “Poland’s old plan” based on the recognition of a strong Germany and Russia with the Visegrád Group forming a third regional force, Ukrainska Pravda news website wrote.
