BUDAPEST – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, known for his nationalist stance, expressed enthusiasm on Friday over Budapest being chosen as the venue for anticipated discussions between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The primary agenda for this meeting includes deliberations on ending the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

President Trump revealed on Thursday his plans for a second meeting with President Putin this year, just a day before his scheduled talks with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at the White House. While no specific date has been finalized, Trump indicated that the meeting in Hungary’s capital, Budapest, could occur within the next two weeks.

In an address on state radio, Orbán, who maintains a strong alliance with Trump and is regarded as Putin’s closest collaborator within the European Union, implied that Budapest’s selection as the meeting location was influenced by his persistent opposition to Western support for Ukraine, both militarily and financially, in its defense against Russian aggression.

“Budapest is effectively the sole location in Europe capable of hosting such a meeting,” Orbán remarked. “This is largely because Hungary is one of the few countries advocating for peace. We have consistently and vocally pursued this stance over the past three years.”

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Hungary has maintained its refusal to supply arms to Ukraine or permit their passage through its territory. Orbán has also threatened to veto certain European Union sanctions against Russia and has delayed the EU’s major funding packages aimed at supporting Kyiv.

Meanwhile, Hungary has actively resisted weaning off of Russian fossil fuels that help fund Moscow’s war, and, in contrast to almost all of the EU’s other 26 countries, has even increased its supplies since the 2022 invasion.

The meeting in Budapest comes after Trump failed to secure an agreement to end the war in Ukraine during an August meeting with Putin in Alaska. Falling short of his campaign pledge to quickly stop the bloodshed, Trump rolled out the red carpet for the man who started it.

Budapest hosting the Trump-Putin meeting holds symbolic significance: it was in the Hungarian capital in 1994 that the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia granted Ukraine assurances of sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.

Yet for many Ukrainians, the Budapest Memorandum has become a symbol of promises that carried no weight after Moscow shredded the agreement first with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then with the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Orbán, who has often taken an adversarial stance against Ukraine and Zelenskyy, has consistently portrayed his position as pro-peace, while casting his European partners that favor assisting Kyiv in its defense as warmongers. Yet Orbán’s critics view Hungary’s position as favoring the aggressor in the war and splintering European unity in the face of Russian threats.

On Friday, Orbán said he’d spoken to Trump on Thursday evening and would speak directly with Putin on Friday morning. Set to face the most challenging election of his last 15 years in power in April, Orbán said that while the upcoming negotiations in Budapest were “not about Hungary,” the capital’s hosting of the meeting could be viewed as a personal political success.

“God knows when was the last time there was such an important diplomatic event in Hungary, where we are not simply hosts, but it is also considered a political achievement,” he said.

Hungary is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, which in 2023 issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes. As a signatory, Orbán’s government would be required to arrest Putin if he set foot on Hungarian soil.

But Orbán said in April that his country would begin the process of withdrawing from the court after he gave red carpet treatment in Budapest to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also faced an ICC warrant on suspicion of crimes against humanity for his conduct of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.