The military conflict between Russia and Ukraine will end in 2025 either through peace talks or with the destruction of one of the warring parties, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told the Magyar Nemzet newspaper.
The United States and Europe have spent about €300 billion on aid to Kyiv over the years of fighting, Orban said, noting that all that money could have been used to improve the standard of living throughout Europe.
"We could have raised the entire Balkans to the level of European development. We could have curbed migration, we could have built a completely new European defense system. But this money has been wasted. Ukraine has lost territory, part of citizens have left the country, and its infrastructure, transport, and energy system have been destroyed to the ground,” Orban said.
Nevertheless, the policy of peaceful years will come to replace the military policy in 2025, and Europe will achieve economic success, the Prime Minister of Hungary said.
Commenting on Orban's remarks, Kremlin's official spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia would continue the special operation to achieve its goals.
The Hungarian prime minister believes that Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 US presidential election marked the beginning of a difficult period in world politics. The "strong and stable" German Chancellor Angela Merkel left office, the political system of France "has shown its ugliest face," and Europe simply could not handle the military conflict with Russia, he said.
In the fall of 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not predict when the military actions was going to end. He earlier said that the fighting would end in two to three months if the US stopped supplying weapons to Kyiv. Russia does not need a ceasefire, but peace, Putin indicated. According to him, Russia needs a "long-lasting, durable, guarantee-based peace for the country and its citizens. Putin has repeatedly said that Moscow is ready to conduct a dialogue based on the 2022 Istanbul agreements and realities on the ground.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in November that he hopes for the fighting to end in 2025 through diplomacy. The Trump administration will contribute to this, Zelensky said, adding that the talks should be conducted not only with Moscow.