“Hungary has made a decision. We respect this decision,” said a spokesman for the Russian president. “We expect to continue our very pragmatic contacts with the new leadership of Hungary,” he told journalists.
At the same time, he stated that the result of the Hungarian elections will not, in his opinion, affect the development of the Russian war against Ukraine.
In Sunday’s Hungarian parliamentary elections, the opposition party Tisza won, ending the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was pushing a policy friendly to Moscow.
Even before Peskov, Dmitriev, one of Moscow’s negotiators on ending the Russian war in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s representative for foreign investments, commented on the result of the Hungarian elections on the X network. “This will only accelerate the disintegration of the EU. In four months, see if I was right,” he wrote.
At the same time, it was not a separate contribution by Dmitriyev, but a reaction to the lament of the British far-right activist Tommy Robinson about the “fall” of Hungary in connection with the election results, TASS agency noted.
Dmitriyev previously described Orbán as “one of the few voices of wisdom and common sense in Europe”, saying that the Hungarian prime minister understands the seriousness of the impending energy and economic crisis and knows what needs to be done to minimize the damage. He added then that Europe must listen to its “few voices of reason”, recalled the Russian website RBK.
Photo: Profimedia.cz
Russian plenipotentiary and negotiator Kirill Dmitriyev
Neither the Kremlin nor the Russian diplomacy commented on the result of the Hungarian elections in the first hours after Orbán’s clear defeat, and the Russian media did not give it much space either.
Deputy Chairman of the State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Dmitrij Novikov from the Communist Party, said that “reality” can “force” Magyar to cooperate with Russia despite EU pressure. Magyar himself did not rule out pragmatic negotiations with Moscow before the elections.
The unusually friendly relationship of Orbán’s government towards Russia, including the willingness to block EU anti-Russian sanctions, was manifested, among other things, in phone calls between Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin or the head of Hungarian diplomacy, Péter Szijjárt, with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the recordings and transcripts of which appeared in the media shortly before the Hungarian elections.
After counting almost 99 percent of the votes, the Tisza party had 138 seats in the 199-member parliament, which ensured it a constitutional majority.
