BELGRADE (Sputnik) – The retreating coronavirus pandemic may soon be replaced by another crisis in Europe as the current situation in Afghanistan risks reigniting uncontrollable waves of migration, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Thursday.

‘With the retreat of the pandemic, the issue of migration has resurfaced in Europe. We will again have well-known massive migration from the south and the east. If you follow the news from Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people are already leaving it because of the dramatic change in the situation in the country. They freely enter Turkey, and from there to the Balkans and the southern part of Central Europe’, Orbán said at a joint press briefing with Vucic.

The migration issue will certainly affect Hungary and the western Balkan states, he stressed.

Orbán urged the European Union to expand by including the western Balkans, Serbia included, adding that it would consolidate Central Europe. Otherwise, without the Balkan states the bloc risks stagnation, he warned. 

Orbán is on an official visit to Serbia with Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. Earlier in the day, the diplomat was awarded by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic with the 1st class Order of the Serbian Flag for his contribution to the development of relations between the two nations.

In 1843, the British army chaplain Rev. G. R. Gleig wrote a memoir of the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War (1839 – 1841) of which he was one of very few survivors. He wrote that it was a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, was acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.