Hungarian Foreign Minister to Attend Security Summit in Belarus Alongside Russia and Syria

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó will speak at the Minsk Conference on Eurasian Security in Belarus this week, Politico reported.

According to the publication, the Hungarian foreign minister will join other participants on 31 October, including his Russian and Syrian ‘colleagues’ Sergei Lavrov and Bassam Sabbah.

According to journalists, this meeting in Belarus should be seen as a competitive event to the Munich Security Conference.

A spokesperson for the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said that the event ‘will be used as an opportunity to discuss and outline the promising contours of the future Eurasian security, the future security of our region’.

Siyarto, like Hungarian Prime Minister Orban, regularly visits Moscow, St Petersburg and Minsk.

The last time he was in Russia in October, Szijjártó spoke at a forum in St. Petersburg organised by Russian energy giant Gazprom and said that ‘secure and affordable gas supplies to Hungary are impossible’ without cooperation with Russia. In late May, he also visited Minsk.

Szijjártó was the first high-ranking EU official to visit Belarus in 2023, after the regime of self-proclaimed President Alexander Lukashenko launched a crackdown on the opposition in 2020 and assisted Russia in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.