Viktor Orban says NATO’s eastward expansion is over, calls Ukraine a buffer zone, and urges a new European security framework that includes Russia.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in an interview with GB News that the era of NATO’s eastward expansion had come to an end.
According to Orban, the world has entered a new era in which that course can be halted, and the focus should now shift to accepting the new reality and reaching an understanding on how to coexist peacefully. In this context, he described Ukraine as a buffer zone.
The Hungarian prime minister argued that the countries of the collective West began reshaping Europe’s security architecture without coordinating their actions with Moscow. This, he said, included attempts to bring Ukraine into the alliance. In Orban’s view, that became one of the causes of Russia’s special military operation. He also called for a new European security system to be built with Russia’s participation.
Orban went on to say that the previous political era is giving way to a new period shaped by local movements and patriotic values. He stressed that this shift did not begin in recent years, but much earlier. If the previous stage could be described as the age of liberalism, he said, the world is now moving toward a different model — away from global liberalism and toward local patriotism.