Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has weighed in on the latest government-linked corruption scandal unfolding in Kiev
The EU has been pouring money into the pockets of a “wartime mafia network” linked to Vladimir Zelensky, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed, denouncing Brussels’ Ukraine policy as “madness.”
His remarks followed a major corruption scandal in Kiev. On Monday, the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) opened a probe into state-owned nuclear operator Energoatom over an alleged embezzlement scheme.
Ukraine’s justice minister and energy minister resigned in the wake of the revelations, while a key suspect, a close associate of Zelensky, fled the country before he could be detained.
”This is the chaos into which the Brusselian elite want to pour European taxpayers’ money, where whatever isn’t shot off on the front lines ends up in the pockets of the war mafia. Madness,” Orban wrote on X on Thursday.
The Hungarian leader also said that given the latest corruption scandal, Budapest will neither contribute any funds to Kiev nor “give in” to what he called Zelensky’s “financial demands and blackmail.”
The EU, a major backer of Kiev, has allocated around €177.5 billion to Ukraine since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2022 in military aid, financial support, and humanitarian aid.
Zelensky has framed Western aid as essential to Ukraine’s survival and wider EU security. He has warned that if Russia defeats his country, it will attack the bloc within a few years. Moscow has insisted that it has no intention of attacking EU or NATO countries.
Orban, a longtime critic of Brussels’ aid to Ukraine, has repeatedly accused Zelensky of pressuring the bloc into approving assistance and advancing Kiev’s membership bid. “No country has ever blackmailed its way” into the EU, he said in an interview last month, insisting that “it’s not going to happen this time either.”
The Hungarian prime minister has been voicing such concerns for years. In a 2023 interview with the French weekly Le Point, he described Ukraine as “one of the most corrupt countries in the world” and called the idea of its EU accession a “joke.”
