Another row with the US ambassador
October 20th, 2023A pro-government pundit rebuffs Mr Pressman’s critique of PM Orbán’s meeting with President Putin in Beijing.
On Tuesday, the day PM Orbán met President Putin of Russia during the Road and Belt Initiative summit in the Chinese capital, US Ambassador David Pressman posted ‘Hungary’s leader chooses to stand with a man whose forces are responsible for crimes against humanity in Ukraine, and alone among our Allies. While Russia strikes Ukrainian civilians, Hungary pleads for business deals’. Cabinet Minister Balázs Orbán reacted by noting that the United States has imported twice as much Russian uranium this year as it did in 2022. ‘We have had enough of the hypocrisy of the US ambassador’, Balázs Orbán added.
In an unusually vitriolic Magyar Nemzet comment (even by his own highly opinionated standards), Zsolt Bayer quotes detailed statistics of US uranium imports from Russia and describes the attitude of the US ambassador as that of a viceroy rather than a diplomat. ‘Silence, Pressman!’ is the headline of his essay. Bayer calls the US ambassador ‘an abject pharisee’, representing ‘a declining and therefore ever more aggressive world power who doesn’t know how to behave’.