Countries outside of Europe want the conflict between Moscow and Kiev to end, Peter Szijjarto believes
FILE PHOTO: Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto arrives at the EU Informal Meeting of EU Foreign Ministers in Prague. © AFP / Michal Cizek
Asia, Latin America, and Africa are puzzled by the EU’s double standards and can’t comprehend why they must suffer because of the conflict in faraway Ukraine, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said.
“I can say that the world outside Europe is looking forward to the end of this war, because they don’t understand many things about it,” Szijjarto explained in an interview with the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet on Tuesday. “They don’t understand, for example, how every time there’s a war outside Europe, the EU looks down from a moral high ground and calls for peace, negotiations and an immediate end to the violence. But when the war is in Europe, the EU fuels the conflict and supplies weapons.”
Brussels doesn’t even provide a platform for meaningful dialogue on the conflict between Moscow and Kiev, as “anyone who speaks of peace is immediately stigmatized,” the FM said. He also pointed out that anyone who refuses to supply arms to Kiev or share the EU’s “mainstream” approach to the crisis “is immediately labeled a spy for Moscow, a friend of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and a propagandist for the Russians.”
The rest of the world also “doesn’t understand why Europe has globalized this conflict. They don’t understand why there is a war in Europe, but it is Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans that have to pay the price for it with skyrocketing inflation, high energy prices, or food insecurity,” Szijjarto remarked.
According to Hungary’s top diplomat, the EU has made a number of “extremely serious mistakes” regarding the conflict in Ukraine, most notably when it “began to destroy European competitiveness with its sanctions policy and … when it joined an arms supply race with the Americans” in an attempt to assist Kiev.
“The more weapons we supply – the more people will die, the longer the war will continue and the greater the destruction will be. And the more sanctions packages we adopt – the more we destroy European competitiveness,” he explained.
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Hungary has taken a neutral stance since the start of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022. It has condemned Russia’s military operation, but – unlike many fellow EU members – it has refrained from supplying weapons to Ukraine, while calling for dialogue and a halt to the fighting. Budapest has also consistently criticized the bloc’s sanctions against Moscow, arguing that they hurt the EU more than Russia.
