Home › Security › Orbán in Kyiv: a ceasefire plan rejected
Orbán in Kyiv: a ceasefire plan rejected
Summary
On 2 July 2024 Hungary's prime minister made his first wartime visit to the Ukrainian capital while Russian strikes hit Nikopol.
What did a ceasefire proposal mean in a country still under fire? On 2 July 2024, two events showed the gap. In Kyiv, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made his first visit since the start of the Russian invasion. In Nikopol, in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Russian artillery and drones killed two people and injured nine.
A first visit, and a plan
Orbán proposed a ceasefire plan during the trip. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected it, according to reports from the day.
The Kyiv stop was presented as part of a wider effort. Orbán described a series of uncoordinated meetings that he called "peace missions". As later reported, the Kyiv meeting with Zelenskyy was to be followed by a trip to Moscow to meet Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and then a visit to Beijing to meet China's president, Xi Jinping. After that, he was to travel to the United States for the 2024 Washington summit and a meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
The war outside the meeting room
The attack on Nikopol, reported the same day, was part of the continuing Russian shelling and drone strikes on the Dnipropetrovsk region. The casualty figures, two dead and nine wounded, were the immediate human cost of the war that Orbán's proposal was meant to address.
The two events together defined 2 July 2024: a diplomatic initiative that Kyiv turned down, and a front-line city absorbing fresh strikes.
