Polish Foreign Ministry suggests Hungary leave EU and NATO after Orbán's claims

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski has questioned why Hungary needs to be a member of the EU and NATO following recent criticism of Poland by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Source: Bartoszewski, cited by European Pravda with reference to the РАР news agency

Details: Bartoszewski stressed that unlike Orbán, Poland has not done business with Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, "because it was an attack on Poland, on the US, on the EU and on NATO".

He said Orbán’s speech had drawn very negative comments from the US Embassy in Budapest.

Quote: "I don’t really understand why Hungary wants to remain a member of organisations it doesn’t like that much and which supposedly treat it so badly. Why doesn’t he [Orbán – ed.] just create an alliance with Putin and other similar authoritarian states?

This is on the principle that if you don’t want to be a member of a club, you can always leave. This is certainly an anti-European, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Polish policy [of Hungary – ed.] at the moment."

More details: Bartoszewski noted that Hungary is also blocking €467 million from the European Peace Facility (EPF) that the EU has allocated to Poland to compensate for military equipment that Poland has provided to Ukraine.

Background:

• Earlier, during a planned speech at the Tusványos Summer University in the Romanian resort town of Băile Tuşnad, Orbán had claimed that the Poles "have the most hypocritical and sanctimonious policy in the whole of Europe", since, he said, they "shamelessly continue to do business" with Russia.
• Relations between Warsaw and Budapest have cooled since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 due to their differing views on the invasion. However, Orbán has not openly criticised Poland before.

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