Donald Trump has suggested that he could exempt Hungary from sanctions on importing oil from Russia as he praised Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration during a cozy White House summit.
Trump also called on European leaders to show more respect to Orbán who has clashed repeatedly with fellow EU heads of government over issues of migration, democracy and rule of law.
“I think they should respect Hungary and respect this leader very, very strongly because he’s been right on immigration,” Trump said as he sat next to Orbán at the White House on Friday.
Orbán has said that he wants to resurrect plans for a summit between Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin that he claims could bring an end to the invasion of Ukraine. His detractors in the EU believe that Orbán is too close to Putin and have called him the Kremlin’s “trojan horse” in the bloc.
The meeting was seen as a litmus test for the White House’s new energy sanctions against Russia’s largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, both of which continue to export energy products to Hungary and Slovakia. Hungary has said it wanted an exemption from the sanctions because it claims to have no other viable source for the oil.
Asked whether he could exempt Hungary from secondary sanctions, Trump said: “We’re looking at it because it’s very difficult for him to get the oil and gas from other areas.
“It’s a big country, but they don’t have sea,” he said. “They don’t have the ports. And so they have a difficult problem.”
Other countries in Europe “don’t have those problems, and they buy a lot of oil and gas from Russia. And as they know, I’m very disturbed by that.”
Orban was reportedly set to offer Trump pledges to purchase US liquefied natural gas and nuclear fuel as an incentive to exempt Hungary from secondary sanctions, Bloomberg reported.
Related: Orbán to visit US to try to broker another Putin summit but questions raised over motives
The conservative bonhomie was evident as Trump warmly greeted Orbán at the White House, where he called the Hungarian prime minister a “great leader” before ushering him in for a summit that was slated to include a bilateral lunch.
Orbán is seeking a visit by Trump to Budapest to bolster his chances as he faces stiff competition in an upcoming elections, sources in Hungary told the Guardian.
In opening remarks, Orbán praised Trump and slammed the previous Biden administration as “rigged”.
“The reason why we are here to open a new chapter between the bilateral relation between the United States and Hungary basically because during the Democrat administration everything was rigged,” he said, an allusion to unsubstantiated claims by Trump that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“You’ve improved the bilateral relationship,” he said. “You repaired what was done badly by the previous administration, so now we are in quite a good position to open up a new chapter. Let’s say a golden age between the United States and Hungary.”
Trump, who has unleashed a sweeping crackdown on immigration at home, again falsely alleged there was a link between migrants and crime.
“Look what’s happened to Europe with the immigration. They have people flooding Europe,” Trump said.
Describing the issue in more starkly racial terms, Trump said: “You go to some of the countries, they’re unrecognizable now because of what they’ve done. And Hungary is very recognizable.”
Orbán defended his migration policies and lashed out at financial penalties imposed by the EU on Hungary for defying the bloc.
“This is the absurd world we are living in now in Europe,” Orbán said.
“We are the only government in Europe which considers itself as a Christian government. All the other governments in Europe are basically liberal leftist governments,” Orbán said.
