The European Union is weighing plans for foreign ministers to skip a meeting in Budapest amid anger over Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin, diplomats said Monday.
Several diplomats said EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell was considering preventing ministers heading to Hungary for a meeting next month by calling another one at the same time in Brussels.
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The move follows widespread ire among Hungary's EU counterparts after Orban flew to Moscow and Beijing, and met with former US president Donald Trump, as part of a self-proclaimed “peace mission” over the war in Ukraine.
Hungary took over the EU's rotating presidency at the start of July and diplomats were infuriated that Orban appeared to use the position to add weight to his visits.
The six-month presidency passes between the EU's member states and does not mean the holder represents the entire bloc.
Other EU leaders rounded on nationalist Orban – Moscow’s closest friend in the bloc – after his overseas trips to insist that he had been given no broader mandate for any talks.
Diplomats said the de facto boycott of the foreign affairs meeting in Budapest would serve as a reprimand for Hungary and stop it from taking the spotlight afforded by the presidency.
One European diplomat said that if Borrell called a simultaneous meeting “this would take the decision away from ministers.”
“It would not be a political decision for them to not go to Hungary, but instead that they had to go to Brussels,” the diplomat said.
Orban, long a thorn in the EU’s side for his government's backsliding on the bloc's democratic principles and rule of law, remains defiantly close with the Kremlin more than two years after Putin ordered his all-out invasion of Ukraine.
The EU has staunchly opposed Russia’s war and slapped 14 rounds of unprecedented sanctions on Moscow.
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