At the European Council meeting on March 19, 2026, Hungary once again blocked the European Union’s loan (€90 billion) to Ukraine. After a morning in which everyone appealed to a sense of responsibility, Viktor Orbán remained unyielding, forcing his peers to postpone the issue until a future meeting. “Hungary’s position is very simple: we will help Ukraine once we have our oil” (Russian oil, it should be noted), he had declared even before the summit began. Will Hungarian voters place their trust in other political forces?
This stance reflects the Eurasian orientation of Viktor Orbán’s diplomacy, with the support of American Republicans, invoking the Hungarian prime minister’s Christian references. One is led to question the European identity of a country that cultivates relations with Russia, China, and Turkey. A brief look back at the history of modern Hungary is in order.
A country of plains traversed by the Danube, Hungary (population of 10.5 million over 93,000 sq km) is a Central European state born out of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. Established by the Treaty of Trianon (June 4, 1920), the official borders of the new state confirmed the dismemberment of the former Kingdom of Hungary (founded in 1001); Hungary lost more than two-thirds of its territory, and three million Hungarians found themselves in Bolshevik Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. “Hungary,” it was said, “is the only country that is its own neighbor.” Consequently, its foreign policy in the interwar period focused on “revisionism,” a goal that would be partially achieved through an alliance with Hitler’s Germany: Southern Slovakia, Northern Transylvania, Ruthenia, and part of Vojvodina were successively annexed to Marshal Horthy’s Hungary between 1938 and 1941.
In 1945, Hungary was among the defeated nations and returned to the borders defined by the Treaty of Trianon, confirmed by the Treaty of Paris (1947). Now under Soviet rule, Communist Hungary refrained from any irredentist claims that might weaken the Soviet bloc. It was only after the end of this rule and the dissolution of Soviet structures (COMECON and the Warsaw Pact) that geopolitical revisionism resurfaced. The number of Hungarians “abroad” (Hungarians in the ethno-cultural sense of the term) now stands at four million (they live in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Subcarpathian Ukraine, and Austria). This long-standing geopolitical revisionism, temporarily overshadowed during the Soviet era, underlies Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Russophilia, giving rise to geopolitical ideas and perspectives at odds with most of Hungary’s official allies and partners.
A member of NATO and the European Union, Hungary nonetheless serves as a bridgehead for Russia in Europe. Upon becoming head of government in 2010, Viktor Orbán reserved his first visit for Vladimir Putin. Since then, the Hungarian prime minister has affirmed his desire to maintain good relations with Russia and pursue a “policy of openness toward the East,” extended to the People’s Republic of China. “The center of gravity of the global economy is shifting from West to East, from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” he boasts.
This gravitation toward authoritarian regimes led by “strongmen” (Russia, Turkey, Iran, China) is accompanied by praise for illiberal democracy, promoted as the political solution of the future. The Orbán government shares a number of aversions with these regimes: after a significant portion of the Hungarian political class adopted Moscow’s talking points regarding the 2014 Ukrainian civic uprising (“an American plot”), Budapest stopped reselling Russian gas to Ukraine in order to weaken Ukraine’s position and appease Moscow.
In fact, Hungary’s dependence on Russian gas (95% of its imports) largely determines its foreign policy. In the nuclear energy sector, Rosatom was awarded the contract for a power plant in Hungary without a prior bidding process; its construction is financed by a Russian loan worth €10 billion (2014). Hungary’s susceptibility to Russian narratives and interests is a cause for concern even within NATO. During a visit to Budapest in February 2019, Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State in the first Trump administration, stated: “We cannot let Putin drive a wedge between friends in NATO.” He then noted that “autocratic Russia has never been a friend to any small country in Central Europe over the past three hundred years.” The enthusiastic welcome given to technology and capital from the People’s Republic of China is another source of friction with the United States.
Yet Viktor Orbán has managed to maintain close ties with Donald Trump, a political friendship carefully nurtured during Joe Biden’s presidential term (2021–2025). For Trump supporters and American Christian nationalists, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary serves as an ideological and political laboratory, and the prime minister—a regular guest at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—has made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago (Florida), Donald Trump’s residence. Far from thwarting his pro-Putin leanings, Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, beginning on February 24, 2022, has only further fueled them.
Does he have in mind the breakup of that country, which would allow him to annex the Transcarpathian Oblast (Subcarpathian Ukraine), partly populated by Hungarians—whom Kyiv oppresses, according to Viktor Orbán?
While unable to prevent the European Union and its member states from adopting further sanctions against Russia, Viktor Orbán is working to slow the pace and mitigate the impact of these measures. The Hungarian prime minister and his foreign minister echo the Russian narrative, launch attacks against Ukraine and its president, and even appear alongside Vladimir Putin. In November 2024, Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president was seen in Budapest as a providential event, likely to turn Hungary into a sort of East-West diplomatic “hub.”Thus, Viktor Orbán has succeeded in positioning Hungary at the crossroads of Trumpism, Putinism, Sinophilia, and even Pan-Turkism. Indeed, there is a Pan-Turkic movement in Hungary which, arguing for a supposed linguistic kinship between the Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages (a linguistic hypothesis still under debate), promotes the idea of a natural friendship between Budapest and Ankara, from an Altaic geopolitical perspective. Despite Budapest’s architectural setting and the patronage of Saint Stephen, none of this feels much like “Old Europe”: the Apostolic Queen of Hungary, Elisabeth of Wittelsbach (“Sissi”), must be turning in her grave. Viktor Orbán has clearly lost his way, but he is not venturing down the path of a “Hungary Exit.” It is possible, however, that his diplomacy will lead Hungary into an impossible situation, particularly if Europe’s relations with “Russia-Eurasia” become even more strained. Unless, that is, he loses power—as some polls predict—to the Respect and Freedom Party (TISZA) led by current MEP Péter Magyar.
Associate professor of history and geography and researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics (University of Paris VIII). Author of several books, he works within the Thomas More Institute on geopolitical and defense issues in Europe. His research areas cover the Baltic-Black Sea region, post-Soviet Eurasia, and the Mediterranean.