Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said Thursday that it is Hungary’s “sovereign right to negotiate with whomever we want.”
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s top diplomat spoke from Belarus, which he traveled to Thursday to appear as a speaker at the Minsk Conference on Eurasian Security. Other participants at the summit include Szijjártó’s Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and Syrian Foreign Minister Bassam Sabbagh.
The minister’s trip to the Munich Security Conference’s eastern rival caused alarm among the country’s NATO allies, with the United States Embassy even convening the treaty members’ ambassadors to discuss Orbán’s “economic sovereignty” policy.
However, Szijjártó continued to promote the policy in his keynote speech on Thursday, addressing the conference audience in Russian.
In his 14-minute speech, Szijjártó did not mention Ukraine once, nor did he speak specifically about the war — saying only that “Europe and Hungary are facing one of the most serious conflicts since World War II.” Instead, he stressed the importance of “Eurasian cooperation” and “unity in the Eurasian region.”
After his keynote speech, Szijjártó held talks with Lavrov. According to his video statement, Budapest wants to increase “rational” economic cooperation with Moscow in areas “not damned by sanctions,” especially in the energy sector.
He also held talks with Belarusian Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov, with whom the Hungarian minister also made a press statement.
“We believe that the world is going down the drain when some people want to tell others who can talk to whom, who can meet with whom and who cannot. We have a sovereign right to negotiate with whomever we want,” Szijjártó told the press.
The foreign minister said it’s in Hungary’s “national interest” to increase cooperation with Belarus, which was praised by his Belarusian colleague: “We were thinking of giving you an office here, since you travel to Minsk a lot,” Ryzhenkov said.
