As EU leaders gather in Budapest for an informal summit and consider Donald Trump's U.S. election win, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and his Slovakian counterpart Robert Fico call for change in the bloc's strategy on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. CGTN's Peter Oliver reports.
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00:00Viktor Orban's really the the chief cheerleader for this message that now Donald Trump is back,
00:06that the EU needs to rethink its support for Ukraine. He isn't alone. Robert Fico,
00:13the Prime Minister of Slovakia, is also in that group as well, but Orban is the man hosting this
00:20event. He's the one who's been meeting and greeting all of the other European and world
00:24leaders as they've arrived at this event in Budapest. And he said that Europe can't finance
00:31the current support that they're giving to Ukraine alone if the United States pulls out.
00:36Robert Fico, what he said is that, and you've got to remember when Fico came to power, he pulled his
00:40own country's financial aid to Kiev pretty much immediately. He said that Europe needs to only
00:47have the money to support Ukraine once it's dealt with the issues that are attacking Europe itself
00:52directly. And for Robert Fico, he's more concerned about migration than he is about Ukraine and
00:57Russia at the moment. Yeah, Peter, very strong words then from the Hungarian Prime Minister.
01:02European defence also on the agenda. What's being discussed there?
01:09It's a really interesting one, European defence, because you tend to get a lot of disparate views
01:13that come together in saying, yes, there needs to be a united, in many ways, European defence.
01:19We've heard this from Emmanuel Macron, the French president, saying that he doesn't want to, when
01:24his time comes, to step away from world politics, to leave Europe as a collection of herbivores,
01:30I believe was the way he put it, with carnivores surrounding them. He wants to be able to see
01:35European nations invest more in defence. Now, this particular meeting, the European
01:41Political Council, is a meeting that brings together EU member states as well as Turkey,
01:48as the United Kingdom and Ukraine as well. What we have heard, though, is the Ukrainian president,
01:54Volodymyr Zelensky, saying at this meeting that he won't accept proposals that are being put
01:59forward, that he should come to a negotiating table with Vladimir Putin or the Russian side
02:04anytime soon, and there should be a cessation in violence in the country. Volodymyr Zelensky
02:09saying no to that. But there is support here in Europe at this meeting in Budapest for more
02:16financing for European defence. How that takes form, though, and what shape that takes, we've been
02:21talking about this for a lot of years already, it's unlikely it's going to be smoothed over in
02:26this summit in Budapest right now.