President Donald Trump said Friday during a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán he is considering granting an exemption on Russian oil sanctions to allow Hungary to purchase the resource from Russia.
‘We’re looking at it because it’s very difficult for him to get the oil and gas from other areas,’ Trump said Friday when asked by the media if he is prepared to grant Orbán’s request for an exemption. ‘As you know, they don’t have, they don’t have the advantage of having seas. It’s a great country.
‘It’s a big country. But they don’t have sea, they don’t have the ports,’ he continued. ‘And so they have a difficult problem. There’s another country that has that same problem, by the way. But when you look at what’s happened with Europe, many of those countries, they don’t have those problems, and they buy a lot of oil and gas from Russia. And, as you know, I’m very disturbed by that because we’re helping them, and they’re going and buying oil and gas from Russia.’
After months of waffling between confrontation and conciliation toward Moscow, Trump imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies — Rosneft and Lukoil — in October as the Kremlin backed off from talks to end the war with Ukraine.
‘Every time I speak to Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don’t go anywhere,’ Trump said in October when announcing the sanctions. ‘They just don’t go anywhere.
‘I just felt it was time. We’ve waited a long time,’ Trump added when asked why he chose to impose the sanctions at that time and not sooner.
The sanctions came after a planned meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in October was called off.
Orbán, who has a longstanding warm relationship with Trump, in October called the sanctions imposed by Trump ‘a mistake,’ from Hungary’s perspective.
‘We are thinking about how to build a sustainable system for the Hungarian economy because Hungary is very dependent on Russian oil and gas. And, without them, energy prices will skyrocket, causing shortages in our supplies,’ Orbán said in October during a meeting with Italian leaders in Rome.
Orbán told the media his discussion with Trump Friday will include the exemption request, explaining that the pipelines transporting oil and gas are ‘vital’ to the nation because it is landlocked and that he will negotiate the matter with the White House.
Trump told the media that he and Orbán agree the war between Russia and Ukraine — which has raged since 2022 — will end soon, adding, ‘The basic dispute is they just don’t want to stop yet. And I think they will. I think it’s taking a big toll on Russia.’
The pair said it would likely take a ‘miracle’ for Ukraine to win the war.
Trump praised Orbán during the meeting as a ‘great leader,’ namely on his strict immigration policies.
‘The fact is that he’s a great leader, and he’s respected all over,’ Trump said. ‘Not necessarily liked by some of the leaders, but, you know, those leaders have proven to be wrong.
‘If you look at his stance on immigration and other things, you know, if you look at Europe, they made tremendous mistakes in immigration. It’s really hurting them very badly. He has not made a mistake on immigration.’
Orbán also commended Trump, arguing ‘everything was ruined’ by the Biden administration while celebrating Trump’s return to the White House.
‘The reason why we are here to open a new chapter between the bilateral relations of the United States and Hungary, basically, because during the Democrat administration, everything was ruined,’ he said.
‘So, after your leaving president, everything was basically blocked, ruined, canceled. A lot of harm done by the previous administration. In the last ten months, president, what you have done, we are very much grateful for that. You restored the old level of the relationship. You improved the bilateral relation. You repaired what was done badly by the previous administration,’ Orbán said.