Hungarian FM to join Russia, Syria and Belarus at security summit

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

Szijjártó will join other participants, including his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and even Syrian Foreign Minister Bassam Sabbagh, as a speaker on Oct. 31.

The gathering in Belarus should be seen as a rival to the Munich Security Conference, according to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a military alliance of six post-Soviet states including Russia and Belarus.

The Hungarian foreign minister’s closeness to Russia and Belarus is hardly surprising, as Szijjártó regularly visits Moscow, St. Petersburg and Minsk, but a possible link to the Moscow-backed Syrian regime signals an escalation in ties.

The last time he was in Russia, in October, Szijjártó took the stage at a St. Petersburg forum organized by the Russian state energy giant Gazprom to declare that “Hungary’s secure and affordable gas supply is not possible” without cooperation with Russia, “whether we like it or not.”

But he also traveled to Minsk at the end of May to meet with his counterpart. Szijjártó was also the first senior official from a European Union country to visit Belarus in 2023, after Alexander Lukashenko’s regime launched a crackdown on the opposition in 2020.

“The event will be used as an opportunity to discuss and outline the promising contours of future Eurasian security, future security of our region,” the press secretary of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry told the Belta state news agency.

The conference will also be attended by the secretaries-general of Moscow’s international organizations, such as the CSTO and the Commonwealth of Independent States.