There's a story that Hungarians told after their country declared war on the U.S. a week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As reported by Time Magazine in 1942, the Hungarians described how their declaration of war had been relayed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt by U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Hull: “Mr. President, Hungary has just declared war on us.”
Roosevelt: “You don’t say? What is Hungary?”
Hull: “Hungary is a small Balkan kingdom on the Danube.”
Roosevelt: “A kingdom? Who’s the king?”
Hull: “Hungary has no king. It is run by an Admiral.”
Roosevelt: “An Admiral? Where’s his navy?”
Hull: “He has no navy, only an army.”
At the time, Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany, and its ruling regent was Admiral Miklos Horthy, who indeed commanded the Austro-Hungarian navy in World War I in sea battles on the Adriatic. But after its defeat, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up, leaving Hungary landlocked.
You'd think that someone on Trump's team might have given him a geography lesson before the president spoke for nearly 2 1/2 hours by phone last Thursday with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
After their phone conversation, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he would meet Putin in Budapest. Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orban is one of the few leaders of an EU/NATO member country to maintain close ties with Putin.
Did anyone advise Trump that the European Union had imposed a blanket flight ban on Russian planes just days after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
That ban remains in effect amid mounting concerns among EU members about recent airspace violations by Russian fighter jets over Estonia and drones that overflew military bases and critical infrastructure sites in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Poland and Romania.
Then on Friday, Trump held a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that reportedly turned acrimonious when the U.S. leader insisted Ukraine make territorial concessions to Russia to end the war.
But in an apparent face-saving move, Trump announced on Wednesday that he had cancelled the Budapest summit, citing a lack of progress in diplomatic efforts.
Trump told reporters at the White House: “We canceled the meeting with President Putin — it just didn’t feel right to me. It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I canceled it, but we’ll do it in the future.”
It seems that once again Putin has played Trump for a fool when it comes to negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine.
The two had met in August in Anchorage, Alaska. Putin rebuffed Trump's efforts to secure a temporary cease-fire and stuck to his hardline policy of keeping occupied Ukrainian territory.
According to the Kremlin, Trump proposed the idea of holding the meeting in Budapest, which Putin "immediately supported," The Moscow Times, an independent new outlet now operating out of Amsterdam, reported.
It added:
The choice of venue immediately set off questions about how Putin, who is sanctioned by the West and wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges, would reach the central European country. ...
Putin's flight route is “of course, still unclear,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday.
Hungary's Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said last week that his country would "receive Putin with respect." He added that Hungary would not seek to enforce the ICC arrest warrant issued after the Russian president was indicted for ordering the illegal deportations of Ukrainian children from occupied territories.
If you look at the map above, you'll see that there's only one route that Putin could take to reach Budapest without flying through the air space of an EU member. But that's a no go because it would mean flying across the unfriendly skies of Ukraine.
The next shortest route would be flying over Belarus, Poland and Slovakia. But Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski put the kibosh on that route on Tuesday when he said Putin's plane could be forced to land if it attempts to fly over Poland.
“I cannot guarantee that an independent Polish court won’t order the government to escort such an aircraft down to hand (Putin) over to the court in The Hague,” Sikorski told Polish broadcaster Radio Rodzina, according to national media.
The only other option would be a circuitous southern route over the Black Sea and into the EU through Romania or Bulgaria.
The Swedish new outlet Dagens.com reported:
Bulgaria’s Foreign Minister Georg Georgiev said Sofia would open an air corridor to Putin if requested, even though Bulgaria is also bound by ICC obligations. He clarified that while his country must detain Putin if he lands, it is not required to intercept his aircraft in transit.
So such a route would have been risky for Putin its length and the impact of Western sanctions on Russian aviation safety.
So it's not surprising that Trump's top spokespeople at the White House avoided the question last Saturday when Huffpost asked about the selection of the Hungarian capital for the summit.
The Hungarian capital was the site of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenal it had inherited after the breakup of the Soviet Union in return for guarantees that Russia would respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. Putin then broke that promise, starting with the occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Huffpost wrote:
Given all that, HuffPost asked the White House: Who picked Budapest?
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded minutes later with: “Your mom did.”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung after a minute added the far more succinct: “Your mom.”
I wonder what their response would have been if some member of the White House press corps had asked how Putin intended to reach Budapest for the summit. But that's all moot now since Trump managed to cancel the summit in less than a Scaramucci.
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