Results of the Trump-Orbán meeting appear significant, though somewhat unclear

HUNGARY - In Brief 09 Nov 2025 by Istvan Racz

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PM Orbán travelled to Washington DC in the past few days, and he met President Trump on November 7. Mr. Orbán travelled with a large mission, including the foreign, defence and economy ministers, a number of top businessmen and the number of media people needed to make big publicity around the visit. Indeed, the whole tour looked a bit like a modest compensation for the eventually cancelled Trump-Putin meeting in Budapest. Apparently, President Trump wanted to express support for Mr. Orbán in the Hungarian election campaign, and the friendly reception the latter was given in Washington actually did that service. Other than publicity, the results of this event appeared significant but not entirely clear. First and foremost, Hungary has been granted an exemption from the new Rosneft / Lukoil sanctions as regards its Russian oil imports through the Druzhba pipeline and its Russian gas imports through Turk Stream. Mr. Orbán and his foreign minister have repeatedly claimed that the exemption has had no limitation in time. Unfortunately, Reuters reported, referring to an unnamed source in the White House, that the exemption has been given for only one year. Since the first reports, the EU Commission spoke on the issue as well, refraining from comments on US policies but noting that the exact specification of the exemption was not clear for them either. But on the other side, they stressed that nothing the US government told their Hungarian counterpart will change their existing objective to halt all imports of Russian oil and gas into EU member countries by January 1, 2028. In addition, various agreements, cooperation agreements and letters of intent were signed and announce...