BRUSSELS: The EU will hold its next meeting of foreign and defence ministers in Brussels instead of Budapest in a “symbolic” slapdown to Hungary for its ‘rogue diplomacy’ on Ukraine, foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday.

The shift of location for the August 28-30 meeting is a reputational blow to Hungary just weeks after it took up the rotating European Union presidency. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has infuriated almost all his EU partners by conducting breakaway diplomacy with Moscow to explore the path to ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Orban — who is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in the bloc — has also accused the EU of having a “pro-war policy” by maintaining military and financial support for Kyiv.

He has repeatedly stalled Brussels’ efforts to punish the Kremlin and to aid Ukraine in its fight against the invading forces.

“I can say that all member states — with one single exception — are very much critical about this behaviour,” Borrell said after chairing an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels.

“It is Putin, who is the war party. The only one which provokes is Putin, who is calling for Ukraine’s partition and rendition as preconditions for any talks and any ceasefire,” he said.

The Orban government’s position “has to have some consequences”. As a result, “we have to send a signal, even if it is a symbolic signal” to Hungary, Borrell said.

Thus, “I think it was much more appropriate to show this feeling and to call for the next foreign and defence council meetings in Brussels,” he said.

Borrell said 25 of Hungary’s 26 EU partner countries on Monday criticised Orban’s rogue initiative, which Budapest has billed as a “peace mission”. Only Slovakia backed Hungary’s position.

“We fully support Hungary and the initiative for peace,” Slovakia’s interior minister, Matus Sutaj Estok, said as he went into another EU meeting for home affairs.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has directed her commissioners to snub EU meetings being held in Hungary and to send lower-ranking civil servants in their place.

Last week she slammed Orban’s go-it-alone diplomacy, saying “this so-called peace mission was nothing but an appeasement mission”.

“Russia is banking on Europe and the West going soft, and some in Europe are playing along,” she told the European Parliament last Thursday, just before it confirmed her for another five-year term as EU chief.

Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2024