The Hungarian leader blamed Washington for the failure of 2022 Istanbul talks
Russia and Ukraine had been ready to make peace, but Kiev refused to sign the final deal at the urging of Washington, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday.
Speaking with the national Radio Kossuth, Orban agreed with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that it was the US that scuttled the Istanbul peace talks in March 2022.
“What the former German chancellor said is a well-known fact in the world of diplomacy,” Orban said. “And we also know this from all kinds of reports and intelligence sources, that indeed in 2022 in Istanbul, where all kinds of covert negotiations took place, there was essentially an agreement, which – so says the diplomatic rumor – the Ukrainians did not sign on American instructions.”
The Ukrainians “were not allowed to” make peace, because they “first had to ask the Americans about everything,” Schroeder had told the newspaper Berliner Zeitung in an interview last month.
Speaking with Kossuth Radio on Friday, Orban pointed out that Europe tried to contain the Ukraine conflict starting with the Crimean crisis of 2014, through things such as the Minsk agreements.
“The Americans entered this game, and since then the direction is not isolation and localization, but expansion. More and more people are getting involved, more and more weapons are being delivered, more and more money is being spent, the Europeans are taking out more and more loans and sending them over to Ukraine, so I have to say that the conflict is becoming globalized,” the Hungarian prime minister said.
Since the failure of the Turkish-hosted talks, bullets and bombs have done most of the talking between Moscow and Kiev. Ukraine has ruled out any negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and insists on a set of demands that the Kremlin has dismissed as absurd.
The Kiev-based Ukrayinska Pravda reported in May 2022 that Boris Johnson, who was the British prime minister at the time, acted as a messenger for the West when he visited Kiev the month prior, “almost without warning.”
Johnson allegedly told President Vladimir Zelensky that there can be no negotiations with Putin and that even if Ukraine was ready to sign some kind of agreement with Russia, the West was not. Within two months of that visit, Johnson lost the premiership and later even his seat in the House of Commons, ostensibly over a scandal related to Covid-19 lockdowns. Last month he was hired by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) – a Washington-based think tank funded by the US government, NATO, and Western military contractors – on account of his “commitment to Ukraine’s victory.”
