Is PM Orbán cautiously distancing himself from Moscow?

HUNGARY - In Brief 03 Mar 2023 by Istvan Racz

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On March 1, the Russian government issued a decree to ban visa-free travel by Hungarian diplomats to Russian territory, "until Hungary does not stop breaching the provisions of the underlying bilateral agreement". It is not immediately clear in what way Hungary is breaching the agreement in question. But it is quite evident that the Hungarian government has made a number of unfriendly gestures to Russia lately, which may have prompted the Russian government to give a negative response of some kind. As it happened, Hungary voted in favor of the EU's 10th package of sanctions against Russia, even though it insisted on omitting restrictions on the imports of nuclear technology from Russia, and on omitting Rosatom, the Russian company that would build Hungary's Pays 2 nuclear power station, and its representatives from the EU's sanction list. In addition, Hungary supported the UN resolution that condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rather than abstaining from the vote, as Moscow may have hoped. Moreover, two key Hungarian government cabinet members, Foreign Minister Szijjártó, speaking to CNN, and Cabinet Minister Gulyás, at a local press conference, clearly condemned Russia as an aggressor lately. Even more importantly, PM Orbán himself said publicly, on two different occasions in recent weeks, that Russia would not have any real chance to win a war against the western alliance (NATO). True, he keeps adding that Russia "cannot lose the war" either, because the risks attached to a Russian defeat, which would be a major geopolitical shock, are tremendously high. But in the main, speaking to the Swiss weekly newspaper Weltwoche about his understanding of President Putin's...