Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrived in Ukraine on Tuesday for his first wartime go to to the battle-torn nation.

Orban, broadly seen as Russia’s closest ally inside the European Union and a vocal critic of NATO’s assist for Kyiv, is because of meet along with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy to debate peace within the European area.

“The talks will give attention to potentialities for reaching peace, in addition to present points in Hungarian-Ukrainian bilateral relations,” Hungary’s worldwide spokesperson Zoltan Kovacs mentioned on social media.

Orban’s go to crowns months of frequent opposition to the EU’s monetary help packages for Kyiv. In a historic, pre-agreed transfer, Orban left the room in December so EU leaders might take a unanimous stance on opening accession talks with the war-torn nation. The bloc formally began membership discussions with Ukraine and Moldova final week, though a protracted and strenuous path lies forward.

A self-proclaimed “peacemaker,” Orban and his administration have refused to ship weapons to Ukraine and have dissented towards deeper NATO assist of non-member Kyiv — however have additionally agreed to not block NATO initiatives. Orban absented from final month’s Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland, the place Hungary was as a substitute represented by Overseas Minister Peter Szijjarto.

The Hungarian prime minister has additionally been one of many few Western leaders to fulfill the more and more remoted Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now nicely into its third yr. In October, he reassured Putin that Hungary “by no means needed to confront Russia,” the Related Press reported.

This week’s go to comes a day after Orban’s nationalistic authorities assumed the rotating EU presidency underneath a “Make Europe Nice Once more” slogan sharply harking back to the 2016 marketing campaign strapline of former U.S. President Donald Trump. It additionally takes place two weeks forward of a key July 11th of September NATO summit the place departing Secretary-Normal Jens Stoltenberg has signaled he expects allies to agree on additional long-term monetary and safety help for Ukraine.

Whereas not formally on the agenda of his assembly with Zelenskyy, Orban has beforehand taken concern with Ukraine’s alleged failure to safeguard the rights of its ethnic Hungarian minority, largely converged within the Zakarpattia area of western Ukraine.

Hungary has outlined a variety of calls for over the rights of the minority group as a precursor to allowing Kyiv’s entry into the EU. In a key concession, Ukraine’s Parliament in December final yr handed amendments that now enable establishments of upper training to freely select their language of instruction, excluding Russian — abating a number of the long-held consternation of regional minorities because the passing of Ukraine’s 2017 legislation that mandated Ukrainian because the required language of research in state colleges from the fifth grade onward, sparking EU considerations.