Hungarian president to skip NATO’s eastern flank summit

Hungary’s President Tamas Sulyok will not attend the summit of the Bucharest Nine, a group of European countries on the eastern edge of NATO in Riga on Tuesday, Latvian president’s office said.
The summit will not end with a joint declaration of the nine countries, the office added, for the first time since the format was established in 2015.
Instead, a statement will be issued in the name of the presidents of Latvia, Romania and Poland, who jointly host the Riga gathering, a spokesperson for Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics told Reuters on Monday.
Hungary and the other central European nations have been at odds over Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s continued cultivation of close ties to Russia and refusal to give arms to Ukraine.