Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top allies, said that Donald Trump can end Russia’s war in Ukraine if he wins the 2024 presidential election.
“There is a man in the West who would be able to end this war and make peace. That man is Donald Trump,” Orbán told Kossuth radio on Friday, Russian news agency Tass reported. “Hungary would be interested in seeing an advocate of peace at the helm in the United States.”
The Hungarian prime minister has been an avid supporter of the former president and previously said that if Trump had won reelection in 2020, Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. In April, Orbán encouraged Trump to “keep on fighting” in a tweet posted ahead of the former president’s arraignment in New York City on 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records during his 2016 presidential campaign.
The charges were related to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into a payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to keep quiet about an affair she claimed she had with Trump in the past. Trump denied the affair and maintained his innocence.
Meanwhile last month, Orbán called for Trump to return to the White House during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest.
“Come back, Mr. President, make America great again and bring us peace!” Orbán said, according to a translation from the Associated Press. Orbán is also a loyal ally of Putin, showing his support to the Kremlin by trying to thwart sanctions imposed by the European Union against Russia in response to the war in Ukraine.
Russia’s war in Ukraine extended throughout major cities since it began last February, including Kyiv, Kherson, Odesa, and Bakhmut. Putin was confident during the early months of the war that Russia would achieve its goals, but Ukraine showed a stronger-than-expected defense response that was mainly backed by the West. NATO countries and other Western nations continued to supply Ukraine with advanced military weapons, heavy artillery, and tanks, among other defense resources to help defeat Russia.
Trump, who is running for the 2024 presidential election, repeatedly said that he can quickly end the war in Ukraine, but didn’t reveal his strategy to do so. In February, he said that it would be possible to negotiate an end to the war “within 24 hours.” He made similar remarks in January.
“It really has to be done from the office of the president. And you have to get both in a room, and there are things you can say to each one of them, which I won’t reveal now, which will guarantee that this war will end immediately,” Trump said in February.
Newsweek reached out by email to Trump’s media office for comment.
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