Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski of Poland has spoken out against the Orbán administration, the Polish state news agency PAP reports. The Deputy Minister was responding to the speech made by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary at the 33rd annual Tusványos Summer Free University in Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tușnad), Transylvania, Romania.
In his speech, PM Orbán made the claim that Poland is engaging in ‘the most hypocritical policies,’ being strongly against Russia and condemning anyone who is willing to still associate with them, while still doing business with the Eastern European country.
Deputy FM Bartoszewski, however, denied these accusations. He stated that Poland has not done any business with Russia since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, ‘because it was an attack on Poland, on the US, on the EU and on NATO’.
That claim is not entirely true.
While Poland did eventually cut crude oil transports from Russia, the amount initially increased after the invasion. In 2023, Poland bought $2.59 billion worth of imported goods from Russia according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade, mostly mineral fuels, oils, and distillation products. That is a massive decrease from the $16.7 billion in 2022, but still not an insignificant volume of trade.
The Deputy FM then engaged in some harsher rhetoric, which made some headlines even in the international press. He said:
‘I don’t really understand why Hungary wants to remain a member of organizations it doesn’t like that much and which supposedly treats it so badly. Why doesn’t he [Orbán] 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 [by Hungary] at the moment.’
Deputy FM Bartoszewski went on to accuse Hungary of blocking a payment of €467 million from the European Peace Facility (EPF), due to Poland as reimbursement for military equipment sent to Ukraine.
Polish–Hungarian relations, which have been historically very friendly, have been somewhat strained since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
The Hungarian administration has been pushing for a negotiated peace, while the Polish government, under both Former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and the incumbent Donald Tusk, has been more hawkish in their approach to helping Ukraine.
While PM Tusk, who assumed office in December 2023, is a leftist and European federalist, who thus has many disagreements with Viktor Orbán, President Andrzej Duda is a right-wing conservative who is still closely aligned on many issues with the Fidesz government of Hungary.
In his reaction to the scathing criticism, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó stated in a post on social media on Sunday that while the Hungarian government has been tolerating the ‘provocations and hypocrisy’ of the Polish government for a long time now, but Bartoszewski’s comments were ‘the last straw’. He noted that the Poles are clearly hurt by the truth, which is that they are still ‘among the clients of the largest Russian oil company’.
US Ambassador Also Reacts to Orbán’s Tusványos Speech
Deputy FM Bartoszewski of Poland is not the only foreign diplomat who had a harsh reaction to PM Orbán speech in Transylvania.
US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, a frequent and vocal critic of his host nation’s government, has come out once again to raise his objections. He criticized the Prime Minister for showing his support for Former US President Donald Trump again ahead of the upcoming US presidential election.
‘We have no other ally or partner, not a single one, that similarly overtly and tirelessly campaigns for a specific candidate in an election in the United States of America, seemingly convinced that no matter what, it only helps Hungary, or at least it helps him personally, I’m not sure which,’ the Ambassador said at a press conference last weekend.
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