Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban paid a surprise peace visit to Beijing and met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing.
‘China is a key power in creating the conditions for peace in the Russia-Ukraine war’, Orban posted on the social media platform X after his meeting with the Chinese President on Monday.
‘This is why I came to meet with President Xi in Beijing, just two months after his official visit to Budapest’, said the leader of Hungary, which assumed the six-month rotating presidency of the 27-member European Union council earlier this month.
In a video he posted from a Beijing airport tarmac on Monday on X, Orban hailed China as the only world power “clearly committed to peace”. He also posted a photograph and captioned it “Peace mission 3.0”.
Orban’s China visit follows his visits to Russia and Ukraine last week to discuss the prospects for a peaceful settlement in the conflict between the two countries that began in February 2022.
US daily The Washington Post noted that even as Xi embraced Orban in China’s capital city, Russian missiles hit Kyiv, Dnipro and other Ukrainian cities on Monday -killing at least 31 people, including two at a children’s hospital in Kyiv.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was cited by TASS news agency that Orban has displayed his “political will for dialogue.”
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