Orbán on his "peace" initiative: Hungary "did everything it could"

Hungary "did everything it could" when it initiated a Christmas ceasefire and a large-scale prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said.

"Christmas is approaching now, so it was worth making an attempt, and that's what Hungary did. I think Hungary has acted the way one would expect a thousand-year-old European state to act," Orbán stated, as quoted by Telex, a Hungarian independent news outlet.

Hungarian PM says, "One side rejected it [his initiative – ed.], the other side accepted it."

Orbán also believes that the world is on the verge of much greater change than many people think.

"As soon as the next American president takes office, this turnaround that I'm talking about is going to happen across the Western world, it's going to unfold right before our eyes," Orbán said.

On 11 December, Orbán said that Hungary had proposed a ceasefire and a large-scale exchange of prisoners of war for Christmas but that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had allegedly rejected the idea.

Orbán said this in a comment to the Ukrainian president's post, in which Zelenskyy reacted sharply to the Hungarian PM's conversation with Kremlin leader Putin on Wednesday.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó called his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to complain about Ukraine's disapproval of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's initiative to hold a Christmas ceasefire and exchange prisoners of war.