Press play to listen to this article
Voiced by artificial intelligence.
Paul Ronzheimer is the deputy editor-in-chief of BILD and a senior journalist reporting for Axel Springer, the parent company of POLITICO.
BUDAPEST — Vladimir Putin’s handling of a mercenary mutiny shows the Russian president remains firmly in control, Viktor Orb?n said in an interview — putting the Hungarian leader, once again, at odds with his Western partners.
“When it is managed in 24 hours, it’s a signal of being strong,” Orb?n told Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company.
Referring to the Wagner paramilitary group’s recent rebellion, which put troops and armored vehicles dangerously close to Moscow, the Hungarian prime minister said he did not “see any major importance to that event,” separating him from numerous Western officials who, while remaining cautious, have said the uprising exposed weaknesses for Putin.
You may like
“Putin is the president of Russia,” said Orb?n, who has cultivated a close personal relationship with Putin. “So if somebody has a speculation that he could fail or be replaced, [they] don’t understand the Russian people and the Russian power structures.”
Wagner’s aborted rebellion last weekend, which put Russia on the brink of a civil war, led to mounting questions in Western countries about how much damage had been done to Putin’s regime.
The uprising ended with a deal struck between the Kremlin, Wagner and Belarus in which anyone who took part in the attempted coup could escape prosecution and Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin could go into exile in Belarus.
But for Orb?n, Putin’s rule remains intact despite the mutiny, which posed perhaps the biggest challenge to his 23-year run in power.
“Russia operates differently than we do,” the Hungarian prime minister said. “But the structures in Russia are very stable. It’s based on the army, secret service, police. … It’s a military-oriented, minded country.”
He added: “They are not as a country as we are Germany or Hungary. It’s a different world. The structure is different, the power is different, the stability is different.”
The rhetoric is commensurate with how the Hungarian leader has handled Russia since the war started. He was slow to condemn Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has since stood by a Russia-friendly stance in the conflict, an approach that serves both Orb?n’s domestic political purposes and helps preserve a long-term relationship with the Kremlin.
‘It’s a different world,’ said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban
