Images of the prime minister of EU member state Hungary shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin were “very, very unpleasant” and defied logic given Budapest’s past with Moscow, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said on Wednesday, reports Reuters.

Hungary has closer ties to Russia than other EU countries and is considered the main potential opponent of the December decision to open negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the EU, which will require the unanimous support of the bloc’s 27 members.

On Tuesday, Viktor Orbán and Putin held talks in China with great pomp. On Russian television, Orbán told Putin that he never wanted to confront Moscow and tried to maintain bilateral contacts.

“It was very, very unpleasant to see,” Callas, one of Ukraine’s staunchest defenders, told Reuters in an interview in Paris. “How can you shake hands with a criminal who waged a war of aggression, especially one from a country with such a history as Hungary?”.

In March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin, charging him with the war crime of illegally deporting children from Ukraine.

“What happened in Hungary, what the Russians did there, is not that distant past,” Kallas said.

The Hungarian uprising of 1956 was suppressed by Soviet tanks and troops. At least 2,600 Hungarians and 600 Soviet soldiers died in the fighting.

After talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, Callas said Ukraine’s allies should not be distracted by other conflicts and redouble their efforts to demonstrate their long-term commitment.

The immediate priority, she said, is “increasing the cost of aggression” by adding new sanctions, urgently solving the problem of bypassing existing measures and finding ways to use frozen assets by Kyiv.

“The conflict is not frozen, it is a war of attrition,” she said. “It’s also clear that Russia thinks it can take a lot more pain than we can, and he (Putin) is actually playing on that.”

Asked whether next year’s US election could change the situation, she said Washington’s allies would have to deal with whoever is in power, but so far there was still a strong voice in support of Ukraine in her talks with Democrats and Republicans. .

With the war raging between Israel and Hamas, attention immediately shifted from Ukraine to other hot spots in the region, such as the fallout from Azerbaijan’s military operation in Nagorno-Karabakh and rising tensions in the Western Balkans.

“The war in the Middle East, of course, takes away oxygen from all other discussions. This is a reality, but it does not mean that we should lose interest in these territories,” Kallas said.