Wednesday 08 / April / 2026
Budapest: US Vice President JD Vance welcomed the sudden temporary ceasefire in Iran but also turned his attention to the war in Ukraine and its impact on Budapest during the second day of his visit to Hungary on Wednesday.
Touring the country just days before Prime Minister Viktor Orban will fight for a sixth term, trailing a fellow right-wing rival Peter Magyar considerably in many polls, Vance touched on several of the veteran populist’s main campaign talking points.
Vance said the Trump administration had made “significant progress” in its efforts to broker a halt to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an accord between Kyiv and Moscow, but conceded it had been “the hardest war to solve.”
“In some ways we thought it would be the easiest, but it has been the hardest,” Vance said.
He criticised European leaders while praising Orban, arguably the NATO leader who has retained the closest ties to Moscow during the war, for their behavior amid the diplomatic impasse.
“We’ve been disappointed by a lot of political leadership in Europe because they don’t seem particularly interested in solving this particular conflict,” he said.
European governments, meanwhile, counter that while they want to bring the conflict to an end, it should be what they call a just peace and not amount to an enforced partial Ukrainian capitulation.
US President JD Vance and Zoltan Szalai, director general of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, speak at an event in Budeapest. April 8, 2026.
Vance said he was optimistic that an end to the fighting could be brokered, “because fundamentally this war has stopped making sense.”
However, he said it “takes two to tango.”
“We’re talking about haggling at this point over a few square kilometers of territory in one direction or another, is that worth losing hundreds of thousands of additional Russian and Ukrainian men?” he asked. “Is that worth an additional months or even years of higher energy prices and economic devastation?”
Why is Ukraine one of Orban’s main talking points?
Orban’s political difficulties at home do not seem to stem from his foreign policy positions, but rather domestic scandals like corruption and a child sexual abuse scandal in state-run institutions. His rival Peter Magyar is a former nationalist ally who has not focused on international affairs, or signaled any plans for wholesale change, in his campaigning.
If anything, Orban seems to consider his image as a strong veteran leader willing and able to confound other European leaders in Brussels as a feather in his cap. He’s been making criticism of the EU and Kyiv a cornerstone of his election campaign.
Vance chimed in on this, saying that Orban had been the most helpful European leader in the US’ faltering diplomatic efforts.
“The most helpful has been Viktor, because Viktor is the one who’s encouraged us to truly understand this, to understand from the perspective of both the Ukrainians and the Russians what is necessary for them to end the conflict,” he said.
Hungary has been in dispute with Ukraine for weeks, intensified amid the rising fuel prices and the war in Iran, because of the halt to oil deliveries from Russia via a pipeline that travels through Ukraine.
Ukraine says Russian bombardment damaged the pipeline, Hungary says it doubts this version of events. Landlocked Budapest was granted an exemption to EU sanctions on buying Russian oil because of its high dependence.
Orban is blocking a major EU loan package for Ukraine, originally agreed in December, as a result. Vance brought up the argument over the issue on Wednesday.
Vance called Ukrianian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s reaction to Orban’s blockage “scandalous.” Zelenskyy had intimated that he could give Ukraine’s military Orban’s address.
Over Easter, Serbia and Hungary alleged that they had uncovered an attempt to sabotage another Russian pipeline, this time delivering gas, known as the Balkan Stream. Ukraine said it knew nothing of the alleged case.
