During a meeting in Belo Horizonte, European leaders asked the US President Donald Trump to use his influence on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to refuse to block Ukraineʼs entry into the European Union.
Bloomberg writes about this, citing sources.
According to the publicationʼs sources, Trump called Viktor Orban after talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders, as well as a conversation with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin. Their conversation took place after EU leaders held an additional unscheduled meeting in the Oval Office.
Trump called to discuss why the Hungarian prime minister is blocking Ukraineʼs talks to join the European Union. During the conversation with Trump, Hungary also expressed interest in holding the next round of talks between Putin and Zelensky.
The next day, the Hungarian prime minister wrote that he had heard the request for EU membership, but had no plans to back down.
"Ukraineʼs membership in the European Union does not provide any security guarantees. Therefore, linking membership with security guarantees is unnecessary and dangerous," Orban noted.
Results of the negotiations in Washington
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US President Donald Trump, and seven European leaders met at the White House on August 18. They discussed security guarantees for Ukraine and trilateral talks between the presidents of the United States, Ukraine, and Russia.
The talks focused on the issue of guarantees for Ukrainian security. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that the parties would begin by considering guarantees such as those in Article 5 of the NATO Charter.
After the meeting, Trump wrote that the parties discussed what guarantees various European countries would provide under US coordination. Marco Rubio later stated that after the war, Ukraine would have the right to conclude security agreements not only with the United States and European countries. Washington is currently working on this.
At the end of the talks, the American president called Putin. After the conversation, he wrote that he had begun preparing for a trilateral meeting with Zelensky and Putin.
Zelensky said that Russia has proposed holding a bilateral Ukraine-Russia meeting first, and then a trilateral one. Zelensky says he will discuss the issue of territories with Putin.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb said that in a conversation with Trump, Putin agreed to a bilateral meeting with Zelensky. However, Moscow has not officially confirmed this.
Reuters wrote that the meeting of the leaders of Ukraine and Russia could take place in Hungary. As for the trilateral meeting of Trump, Zelensky, and Putin in Europe, they suggest considering Geneva, Switzerland, or the Italian capital, Rome.
- Hungary has been blocking Kyiv’s efforts to join the EU. For example, in April 2025, the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán urged Hungarians to vote against Ukraine’s EU membership in a national poll. The results of that vote were released on June 26, with Hungarian authorities claiming that 95% of Hungarians were against Ukraine’s EU membership.
- Earlier, opposition Hungarian politician Peter Magyar criticized the “national consultations” organized by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s team and called them a failure. Magyar said that at most 600 000 Hungarians took part in the survey, the lowest figure in the history of national consultations. And “tens of billions of forints” were spent on it.
- The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine reacted to the Hungarian national consultations on Ukraineʼs accession to the EU and stated that "the real goal of this anti-Ukrainian hysteria is to shift the attention of Hungarian society from the failures of the governmentʼs socio-economic policy to an imaginary external enemy".
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