Hungary can leave the EU and join Russia in a union that would suit its interests, a Polish minister said on July 28.

Deputy Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Teofil Bartoszewski was responding to a speech by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who said over the weekend that Poland pursued "most deceitful politics" in Europe regarding Russia's war in Ukraine.

"Why doesn't Orban form a union with Putin and some other authoritarian states of that sort? It's like if you don't want to be a member of a club, you can always leave. It is certainly [Orban’s] anti-EU, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Polish policy at the moment," Bartoszewski said.

Poland and Hungary have long been at odds over the war in Ukraine but relations have nosedived since Donald Tusk's centrist government replaced the radical rightwing Law and Justice government in December.

Warsaw is one of the EU’s most vocal backers of Kyiv and considers defeating Russia the EU’s top security priority, fearing that Moscow, if it prevails in Ukraine, could become a direct threat to Poland and fellow EU member states Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Orban’s Hungary has opposed the EU’s support for Ukraine by blocking or delaying the bloc’s efforts to sanction Russia and provide military or financial assistance to Kyiv.

Hungary also continues to import substantial amounts of Russian oil and gas, their business dealings contradicting the West's sanctions aimed at weakening the Russian economy, which relies heavily on hydrocarbon sales.

Warsaw is "indirectly doing business with the Russians” and yet Warsaw "morally lectures us for doing the same thing,” Orban said while visiting Romania, suggesting that Poland was pursuing its “old plan” to become Europe's main outpost of the US.

Poland has indeed been one of the EU’s strongest allies of America, a position only strengthened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Orban’s prominence in the EU rose since Hungary’s takeover of the bloc’s rotating presidency in July.

Orban marked the occasion by visiting Moscow and Beijing in an effort that dismayed the EU for being an attempt to speak on the EU’s behalf on how to move forward to end the war.

“I don’t see how this Hungarian symmetry – situating itself between Moscow and Brussels – increases Hungary’s leverage. Instead, it irritates everyone else,” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in an interview for Visegrad Insight last week.

He also claimed that his Hungarian counterpart, Péter Szijjártó,  changed his mind about a Polish proposal to hold an EU meeting in Ukraine after receiving instructions from Budapest, Euractiv reported, a claim that Budapest rebutted.

“(Sikorski) has crossed another line and lied when he claimed that I enthusiastically supported his nonsense proposal to hold the next informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Ukraine,” Szijjártó posted on his Facebook page.

Hungary remains unfazed by Polish criticism.

“The [Polish] reaction proves the truth of the Hungarian saying that goes: the truth hurts,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on social media.