What Hungary's Orban did - and didn't - get from Trump

The one-year window granted by the US is nevertheless a valuable respite for Hungarian households this winter.

Orban told pro-government reporters who travelled with him to Washington that otherwise utility bills "could have gone up by up to three times in December". Capping those bills by various means has been a central plank of his popularity in Hungary since 2013.

Under the US exemption, Hungary can also continue to buy Russian gas through the Turkstream pipeline, which traverses the Balkans, and pay for it in hard currency ($185m in August alone) using a Bulgarian loophole. Orban has agreed to buy LNG from the US worth $600 million, according to Bloomberg.

Another key part of the Washington deal is nuclear.

Hungary agreed to buy US nuclear fuel rods for its Paks 1 nuclear power station (at a cost of $114m), in parallel to those bought from Russia's Rosatom and France's Framatome.

Russian plans to finance and build the nuclear extension, called Paks 2, have been long delayed by technical and licensing issues. The US agreement to lift all nuclear sanctions on Hungary may help restart that project, but thorny problems remain.

Hungary has also agreed to buy US technology to extend the short-term storage of spent nuclear fuel at Paks for between $100m and $200m.

Perhaps the biggest part of the deal was a Hungarian commitment to buy up to 10 small modular nuclear reactors from the US, for somewhere between $10bn and $20bn.

Hungary needs electricity to power the huge Chinese battery plants being built around the country. Smaller nuclear plants are less plagued by building delays, and are easier to licence.

Finally, a currency swap deal - similar to a recent US-Argentina deal to prop up the peso - under which US and Hungarian central banks can exchange currency is being discussed.

This would mean that in a future financial crisis in Hungary, the US central bank could feed dollars to Budapest, which boosts financial security in Hungary.

So in summary, Hungary struck a deal to buy US gas, nuclear energy and unspecified weapons systems in exchange for a temporary waiver from US sanctions on Russian oil and gas.

But it failed to get the re-introduction of the US visa waiver system, abolished in 2022, which harms mutual trade. And it did not get a new date for a potential Trump-Putin summit in Budapest as part of efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Critics say energy dependence on Russia is being replaced by energy dependence on the US. The Orban government argues it is achieving greater diversity of supply.