Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban cultivates close relationships with right-wing populists, autocrats, and dictators around the world – from Aleksandar Vučić to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin. Orban even helps some of them escape when they face problems with the judiciary – even at the cost of the Hungarian state getting involved in illegal and mafia-like activities.
In 2018, Hungary staged a crime-fiction escape for former Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski from Skopje to Budapest. Hungarian diplomatic vehicles were used to transport Gruevski across multiple borders without being noticed. The former prime minister was supposed to serve a prison sentence for corruption in Macedonia – instead, he was granted asylum in Hungary.
In March 2024, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro temporarily took refuge in the Hungarian embassy in his home country – presumably to avoid possible arrest. Just before Christmas 2024, Hungary granted asylum to former Polish Deputy Prime Minister Marcin Romanowski, for whom a European arrest warrant was issued.
Arrest warrant for Dodik
Hungary's latest "rescue mission" far surpasses all of these cases. It has serious security and political consequences for Europe, as well as geopolitical influence. It is about the possible escape of Milorad Dodik, the president of the majority Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, to Hungary - at least that is what the entire Bosnian-Herzegovinian government assumes. One thing is certain, Orban recently provided his friend Dodik with special emergency units.
Background: Dodik was convicted in the first instance in late February for constitutional violations against the unitary state, which consists of Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to one year in prison and a six-year ban on political activity. The verdict, however, is not yet final, and the appeals process is ongoing. However, a general arrest warrant was issued in BiH last week.
Hungarian police in Bosnia and Herzegovina
As a preventive measure, Hungary sent a special unit of its police to Republika Srpska at the end of February, as Dodik himself announced when the verdict against him was handed down. The 78 members of the Hungarian anti-terrorist unit TEK arrived together with armored vehicles and a mobile command center.
According to the Hungarian government, this is a joint exercise with Serbian special forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, it is strange that this exercise was not announced in advance, contrary to European customs. Also, the TEK soldiers entered the country via neighboring Serbia, without the knowledge of the Bosnian authorities – and they did so partly in civilian clothes.
Viktor Orban boasts that under his leadership, Hungary is, besides the Vatican, the only country in Europe that “stands on the side of peace” and actively advocates for peace in Ukraine. However, by sending Hungarian police officers to Republika Srpska, Orban qualifies as an assistant to warmongers.
Because Dodik has been agitating against the existence of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina for years and constantly threatens the secession of Republika Srpska. The conflict has escalated to the point where Dodik openly ignores the judiciary and, in the event of his eventual arrest, threatens to use force that could lead to the secession of Republika Srpska from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The idea of a "Serbian world"
Dodik receives support from Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who, in the spirit of the “Russian world”, promotes the concept of the “Serbian world” – the spiritual and cultural unity of all Serbs and their unification in a single nation-state. This policy has been causing increasing tensions in the region for several years and today makes a new war in Bosnia or Kosovo possible. By supporting Dodik and Vučić, Orban is thus significantly contributing to the destabilization of the entire region.
Orban's intensive engagement in the Western Balkans has lasted for more than a decade. The Hungarian prime minister maintains the closest relations with Vučić and Dodik. Balkans expert Adnan Ćerimagić calls this autocratic trinity a "brotherhood".
Mutual recognition
Orban and Vučić have jointly initiated investment projects worth billions, including the Budapest-Belgrade high-speed railway, financed with Chinese loans. In Republika Srpska, Orban helped Dodik, who was in a bind due to US sanctions, with a financial package of one hundred million euros in 2021. A year later, he approved another loan of 110 million euros at favorable interest rates.
The three statesmen from the "brotherhood" are happy to award each other high state orders. In April 2024, Orban received the "Order of Republika Srpska" from Dodik, which had previously been awarded to Vladimir Putin and Peter Handke, among others. In turn, on February 18, 2025, Orban awarded Vučić the highest order of merit in Hungary, and Milorad Dodik was invited as a guest to the ceremony in Budapest.
Regional power Hungary
For Orbán, it is a long-term strategic decision to support candidate countries for EU accession in the Western Balkans, provided they are governed by autocrats similar to himself. The Hungarian prime minister hopes that this will help him strengthen his position within the European Union. At the same time, Orbán is seeking to establish Hungary as a regional power in Central and Southeast Europe.
Ethnonationalist concepts, such as the “Serbian world”, are not foreign to Orban either. There are Hungarian minorities in all of Hungary’s neighboring countries, and they are particularly numerous in Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania and Serbia. When it comes to Ukraine, Orban apparently does not rule out the possibility of its future disintegration, after which Hungary could regain parts of the western Ukrainian region – the Transcarpathian region. Orban already often calls his eastern neighbor “no man’s land” or “the area called Ukraine”.
Warnings from the USA
It remains unclear why Orban would go so far in his special support for Milorad Dodik and Republika Srpska. Dodik, an even closer ally of Putin than Orban, remains under sanctions by the United States. The United States has reportedly strongly criticized TEK's involvement in Republika Srpska and warned Hungary not to continue supporting Dodik's separatist plans.
Orban has also completely ruined relations with the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia and Herzegovina recently banned the landing of a Hungarian military plane carrying a state secretary from Orban's government. The Croatian representative in the Bosnia and Herzegovina Presidency, Željko Komšić, even demanded Hungary's exclusion from the EUFOR/ALTHEA peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
However, Hungary could have an economic interest in Republika Srpska, especially when it comes to mining projects, as media in Bosnia and Herzegovina have recently reported. According to these reports, Hungary could be granted a concession to exploit lithium in eastern Bosnia. This would be significant for Hungary, given that Orban wants to make his country one of Europe's largest battery producers.
Dodik denies genocide
Milorad Dodik, despite an arrest warrant, suddenly appeared in Israel on Tuesday afternoon (March 25, 2025), where he participated in a controversial conference on anti-Semitism organized by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism, along with numerous right-wing extremists from around the world. On this occasion, Dodik posted the following message on the X platform: “Serbs and Jews are peoples that others wanted to destroy – and yet they survived. That is why we understand each other. And that is why we stand together.”
That statement is cynical and grotesque in many ways. There was never a plan or action to exterminate all Serbs.
Dodik, on the other hand, denies the genocide of Muslim Bosniaks in Srebrenica in 1995. To “scientifically” substantiate this, he established a commission headed by controversial Israeli Holocaust historian Gideon Greif. In 2021, that commission did indeed “determine” that there was no genocide in the small eastern Bosnian town – which contradicts the rulings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
The Commission's report is considered unscientific by international experts and researchers. However, Dodik stands by his version of events: according to him, the victims – even in the wars in the former Yugoslavia – were, above all, Serbs.
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