Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán questioned Ukraine’s long-standing desire to join NATO, and his almost sarcastically expressed stance came after NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday that “all NATO allies have agreed to , so that Ukraine will one day become a member of NATO,” reports News.ro with reference to the BBC.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has consistently stated that Ukraine will join NATO in the medium term after the end of the Russian invasion.

However, Viktor Orbán was quick to express his surprise at the NATO chief’s latest statement on the matter.

“What?!” Hungary’s prime minister exclaimed in a one-word tweet Friday afternoon in response to a POLITICO article about Jens Stoltenberg’s comments.

At a summit in Bucharest in 2008, NATO members, including Hungary, agreed that Ukraine would eventually join the alliance, but then backed away from immediate membership, largely due to opposition from France and Germany.

NATO is a military alliance consisting of 31 countries, and acceptance of a new member requires unanimity. Hungary, like any other NATO member, can veto the entry of new members. Joining the Western military bloc provides the advantage of the protection of Article 5 of the founding treaty, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. This means that if Ukraine, as a NATO member, is invaded or attacked, all NATO members, including Hungary, must come to its aid.

Hungary has been blocking summits between NATO representatives and the Ukrainian military for years

But Hungary, which joined NATO in 1999 and has been suspected of pro-Russian sentiment since the start of the war in Ukraine, has already demonstrated its temptation to use its power as leverage to oppose the alliance’s expansion. After several months of delays in March, it was the penultimate NATO country, the last being Turkey, to ratify Finland’s accession to NATO, which has already been approved by all members in the summer of 2022 at the Alliance’s summit in Madrid. Budapest also joined Turkey in blocking Sweden’s bid. In March, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs accused Swedish officials of sitting on “a crumbling throne of moral supremacy,” the BBC reports.

On the other hand, relations between Kyiv and Budapest have long been strained, and Viktor Orbán has been less critical of Russian leader Vladimir Putin than other Western leaders. And although his government condemned the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Hungarian leader did not send weapons to Kyiv and continues to conduct business with Moscow in the energy sector. Hungary has also blocked summits between NATO officials and the Ukrainian military leadership for years, claiming that it is concerned about the rights of Hungarian speakers in western Ukraine, the BBC notes.

Despite his statements, Jens Stoltenberg admitted during a meeting at the American Ramstein Air Base in Germany that Kyiv’s approach to joining the Alliance is not an immediate priority. “The main task now, of course, is how to make Ukraine win (in the war with Russia),” he said. “Without a sovereign and independent Ukraine, there is no point in discussing accession,” Stoltenberg said.

But Budapest’s position promises to ignite a new dispute within NATO, the BBC notes. The bloc’s eastern members have spent months pressuring officials to provide Kyiv with a timetable for entry and signals that it is making progress toward joining the alliance.

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