EU funds 27 June 2025, 9:28am

EU leaders adopt declaration on Ukraine, again without Hungary

Portfolio

26 EU heads of state and government say the European Commission should speed up Ukraine's EU accession process, according to the final declaration of the leaders' meeting in Brussels on Thursday. Hungary is the only country left out, as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vetoed the joint EU declaration again, for the third consecutive time.

According to the published part of the final declaration on this issue, the leaders of the member states reaffirmed Ukraine's right to “freely choose its own destiny” under the UN Charter and international law. The European Union remains firmly committed to Ukraine's EU accession aspirations.

The European Council commends Ukraine for the pace of its accession-related reforms under the most challenging circumstances, welcomes the significant progress achieved, and encourages Ukraine and the Commission to intensify work in the accession process,

the document reads.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán answered several questions on his arrival, after reading out the results of the 'Voks 2025' opinion poll on Ukraine's accession to the EU. Orbán said that Hungary was unassailable on the issue, claiming that 95% of the nearly two million respondents opposed Ukraine's entry.

The Hungarian government has conducted a massive campaign to increase participation in the Voks2025 referendum. Throughout the country, a large number of billboards have been erected to encourage people to vote, and ultimately to vote ‘no’. Ursula von der Leyen and Manfred Weber were joined on the billboards by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There was also constant encouragement to vote in the state media, with the Voks2025 logo even appearing during football matches on public TV channels. Furthermore, the possibility of online voting was open, with no mandatory checks on whether a real person was filling in the ballot form and how many votes a person cast.

The government's propaganda machine was in full swing before and during the vote, besmirching Ukraine and arguing that its accession to the bloc would lead to the demise of Hungarian farmers and open the door to Ukrainian weapons, drugs, and human smugglers. For example, Alexandra Szentkirályi, the chairperson of Fidesz in Budapest, uploaded a video showing a man tied up behind her in the trunk of a car, with Szentkirályi asking the viewers whether ‘they want to end up like that or not, because Ukraine's accession to the EU would open the door to Ukrainian human traffickers and organ traffickers’.The man tied up in the video was later revealed to be an official in Antal Rogán's cabinet ministry.

The document, which reflects the positions of 26 out of 27 member states, reaffirmed their commitment to a just and lasting peace, based on the UN Charter and international law. The Council welcomed all initiatives, including those of the US administration, aimed at a diplomatic end to the war.

European leaders strongly condemned Russia's continued attacks on civilians and infrastructure and called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

They also called on Moscow to show a real political will for peace and indicated that the EU is ready to impose new sanctions, especially in the energy sector.

They also stressed

the importance of humanitarian aid, the exchange of prisoners of war and the return of Ukrainian children who had been abducted.

They confirmed that the EU will continue to provide military, economic and diplomatic support to Ukraine, in particular with a view to developing its defence capabilities.

The EU is providing €30.6 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine in 2025, with a special focus on reconstruction, and more international aid is expected to be pledged at the July conference on Ukraine's reconstruction in Rome.

The 26 leaders condemned military support to Russia from non-EU countries, including Iran and North Korea, and stressed the importance of accountability for war crimes.

Orbán: It was my ugliest job ever

The Hungarian Prime Minister assessed the EU summit in a short video published on X.

He said he needed Votes 2025, which rejected Ukraine's EU membership by 95%, because it was “almost swept away by public anger”. Prime ministers were unanimous in their opposition to his announcement. They consider Ukraine's EU membership to be “good and desirable” and see the issue from a “war perspective”. When he announced that Hungary would not agree to start negotiations with Ukraine for “fundamental and strategic reasons”, it was a “novel and shocking” move for the others.

Orbán has once again used his recurrent communication formula that

Ukraine is “not a country” because it has no borders, population or territory.

And its economic data are the economic data of a country at war, on which no long-term economic strategy can be built.

He also said that Ukrainians are not used to this situation. “They are building the future Hungarian puppet government”. And Ursula von der Leyen and Manfred Weber are working to create a “pro-Ukrainian and subordinate to Brussels” government in Hungary. "And when they sometimes meet the national government and the Hungarian Prime Minister, whom they cannot blackmail, it gives them a cold shower. But they will get over it somehow."

Orbán said the recent EU summit was his “ugliest job ever”.

Okay, so if anyone had any doubts about what Orbán's anti-Ukrainian stance is really about beyond serving Russian diplomatic interests within the EU, this should make it abundantly clear: Fidesz is facing the biggest domestic political challenge of its 15-year rule so far in the person of ex-Fidesz Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party. For more than a decade, the Fidesz government has built the cohesion of its voter base on campaigns against external enemies, and accused its challengers of colluding with them in the service of “foreign interests”, be it George Soros (the evil Jewish banker), migrants, LGBTQ people who threaten the normality of Hungarian families, or Ukrainians (including the Hungarians of Transcarpathia, whose interests they also invoke despite all the above). Such a government can only keep its voters feverish by fearing and agitating against an external enemy, while more and more polls show Fidesz at a disadvantage because of its dismal economic data, its deteriorating living standards, its health and education situation, its increasingly brazen corruption, its oligarchs flying on private jets and amassing hundreds of billions of forints in wealth.