Hungary's Viktor Orban has claimed that when the war in Kosovo intensified in 1999, during his first term as prime minister, he received a phone call from then-US President Bill Clinton.
And according to him, Clinton asked Hungary to open a second front and attack Serbia, or "at least shoot at them from Hungary through Vojvodina to Belgrade," Orban told an audience in Szombathely, they write. foreign media, the Telegraph reports.
However, as he claims, his government rejected this and responded to the US president's clear request with a "No, sir!".
"If, at that time, we had had a prime minister who only knew how to say 'Yes, sir,' we would have been up to our necks in war," Orban claimed.
According to the Hungarian prime minister, he asked Clinton what would happen in such a situation to the 300,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Vojvodina.
Viktor Orbán further said that they had agreed to discuss the issue in person at the NATO summit scheduled for a week later, but the Americans never raised the issue again, Orbán now claims.
As the Hungarian media outlet recalls, Orban had also spoken about this in 2024, when he said that "they" wanted to drag Hungary into the war, but he did not allow it.
However, Áron Tábor, an American expert and lecturer at Eötvös Lóránd University, has reacted to the Hungarian prime minister's words.
He noted that while there were some plans for a NATO ground operation during the 1999 war in Kosovo, there was no real political support for them and there is no evidence that Hungary was asked to attack Serbia. /Telegrafi/
