The sight of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban sitting down to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week at an economic forum in Beijing in China was met with disbelief in European capitals.

“How can you shake a criminal’s hand, who has waged the war of aggression, especially coming from a country that has a history like Hungary has?”, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas remarked to a Reuters reporter.

The US ambassador to Hungary took to X, formerly Twitter, to criticise Mr Orban as a leader who “chooses to stand with a man whose forces are responsible for crimes against humanity”.

“While Russia strikes Ukrainian civilians, Hungary pleads for business deals,” he posted.

Mr Putin is sought by the International Criminal Court for the alleged unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia in the aftermath of Moscow’s invasion last year.

Mr Orban’s decision to meet the Russian president in person was a clear signal to the West, of which Hungary is a part, that Budapest wants to play no part in the European Union’s agreed policy towards Russia.

A brief statement from the Hungarian government following the meeting in Beijing stated that the two leaders had discussed “oil and gas deliveries as well as nuclear energy”.

The statement provides the answer for Mr Orban and his government’s soft stance towards the Kremlin.

Hungary receives about 80% of its natural gas supply from Russia, mostly via the Turkstream pipeline, which traverses Turkey, and is then transported northwards via pipelines in Bulgaria and Serbia.

Unlike other Central and Eastern European countries, Hungary has maintained its pre-war levels of gas and oil deliveries from Russia.

Budapest has also pursued an existing contract with Rosatom, Russia’s atomic agency, to expand Hungary’s only existing nuclear energy plant.

Hungary is an outlier among NATO members states when it comes to its relations with Russia.

Since the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr Orban’s government has called for a ceasefire and has not armed Ukraine, though has sent humanitarian aid.

In EU circles too, Hungary has decided to ignore the consensus view on the war.

It temporarily vetoed an €18bn EU aid package to Ukraine last December. It was a blunt attempt to stop the EU from freezing cohesion funds destined for Hungary.

The European Commission had found that Budapest had failed to implement a slew of anti-corruption measures, as well as failed to implement new laws to improve the independence of the Hungarian judiciary.

Earlier this month, Hungary vetoed a €500bn military aid package from the EU for Ukraine at a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers in Kyiv.

Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto did not even attend that historic meeting, a first of its kind held outside of the bloc’s borders.

Instead, Mr Szijjarto sent his deputy to Kyiv.

Mr Szijjarto did find time to travel to Moscow last week where he pledged his government’s support for Russian athletes to compete in next year’s Olympic Games in Paris.

Since Moscow’s invasion began in February 2022, Hungary’s foreign minister has made five visits to Russia to discuss energy deals.

At home, Mr Orban has criticised each round of EU sanctions against Russia, though, in practice, Hungary has voted in favour of them.

Hungary’s prime minister condemned Russian aggression immediately after the invasion, but he and his ministers have repeatedly said that Hungary is part of the “peace camp”, and takes a neutral stance towards the conflict.

Zoltan Kovacs, the Hungarian government’s chief spokesperson, posted on X during the week that Hungary has always advocated for “open and transparent dialogue” to find a peaceful solution to the war.

However, those calls for peace remain vague. The Hungarian government has issued no concrete details on how its proposed plan for peace would work in practice.

Crucially, Budapest has not addressed the issue of Ukraine’s right to regain its pre-war territory, nor its right to maintain its 2014 borders, the year Russia illegally annexed Crimea.

Meanwhile, Hungary has continued to do business with Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, a country with which it shares a border and is home to a Hungarian-speaking minority.

Hungary’s government has clashed with the EU on migrant relocation quotas, rule-of-law issues, LGBTQ rights and gender identity.

Now Budapest is adding foreign policy to the list of disagreements with the EU.

Mr Orban’s Fidesz party has governed Hungary since 2010 and currently holds a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament.

As a 26-year-old in 1989, Mr Orban was one of a number of activists who took part in talks with the country’s then-Communist rulers to hash out a deal on the future make-up of a democratic Hungary.

Mr Orban’s handshake with Mr Putin this week, 20 months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is a far cry from the democratic ideals of 1989.