Today, we stopped Ukraine’s EU accession with votes of Vote2025

Today, we stopped Ukraine’s EU accession with the votes of Vote2025; I needed them because I was almost swept away by a wave of rage as the prime ministers of Member States received the Hungarian announcement with undivided enmity, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated in Brussels on Thursday. 

In a video posted on journalist Dániel Bohár’s social media account, Mr Orbán – who is currently attending the EU summit – highlighted that the heads of state and government of the European Union’s Member States believe that Ukraine’s EU membership and subsequent NATO membership are good and desirable. “In contrast to us who believe that those who admit Ukraine to the European Union also admit the war,” the Prime Minister said, adding that those who admit Ukraine to NATO will immediately find themselves at war with Russia, and that amounts to World War III. 

“We look at this thing from a completely different point of view, the point of view of peace, while the others from a feisty, war point of view,” he pointed out. They believe that this war must be won, can be won, and with the Ukrainians’ support they want to win it, he explained. That there is no solution to this war on the battlefield is a position that is only shared by the Slovaks and the Hungarians, the Prime Minister stated. 

“Therefore, when I announced that Hungary did not consent to the commencement of talks with the Ukrainians for fundamental and strategic reasons, it felt like a novel and shock-like experience for them, even though I tried to say it politely, in a measured way, and with arguments, to make it clear that they are talking about the countries of the former Soviet bloc which Hungary itself once belonged to,” he said. Before those countries were admitted to the European Union, they were first admitted to NATO, he stated. By his account this was so because the European Union is not a military alliance and is unable to defend the eastern borders of one Member State or another, and – he explained – “the further East we’re situated, the closer we are to Russia, and the more borders must be secured.” 

He said he had to explain that in contrast to statements made by the President of the European Commission and some prime ministers – to the effect that Ukraine meets the criteria necessary for joining the EU, and “we should put the truth content of these statements to one side” – “I had to remind them that the most important criterion is that there should be a country,” Mr Orbán said, explaining that as long as there is no country, there is no point in talking about any other criteria. 

Meaning that there must be a defined entity, a country with borders, a population, a territory, and in the case of Ukraine, none of these criteria exist; today, Ukraine has no borders. You may well be able to tell where those borders should be legally, but today these are territories occupied by the Russians. Ukraine has no population as a vast number of people have fled the country, and the economic data, too, are the economic data of a country at war, based on which no long-term membership and economic strategy can be built, he stated. 

“So, under such circumstances, it is quite simply not reasonable, is contrary to common sense to admit them,” he stressed. 

In his words, “this is not what they’re used to here,” they are building the prospective Hungarian puppet government, meaning that here the President of the European Commission and the head of the European People’s Party (EPP), Manfred Weber, too, are working to ensure that Hungary has a pro-Ukraine government subjected to Brussels. When they sometimes meet the national government, the Hungarian national position and the prime minister who are not exposed to them and who cannot be blackmailed by them, it comes to them like a cold shower, “but they will somehow get over this,” Mr Orbán stressed.