The trouble with Ukraine being the geographical center of Europe is that it has lots of neighbors, and some of them aren’t so friendly.
Ukraine’s most difficult neighbors at the moment, Russia and Hungary, are pressuring Ukraine from the east and west, both interfering in Ukraine’s internal politics, and trying to impose their political will on Kyiv.
Even more disturbing for Ukraine, Budapest and Moscow are developing a flourishing friendship. The two countries are extending their partnerships in the energy, trade, healthcare, and medical spheres, even though the European Union — of which Hungary is one of the 28 members — has imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its war in the eastern Donbas.
Although the EU is still Hungary’s largest trade partner, its bilateral trade with Russia rose by 25 percent to $5 billion in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a joint press conference with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Moscow on Sept. 18.
Russia provides more than 75 percent of the oil and 60 percent of the natural gas that Hungary consumes. Moreover, in 2015, Russia invested $10 billion into the expansion of Paks Nuclear Power Plant, which supplies about 40 percent of Hungary’s electricity.
And Russia is now considering Hungary as a potential partner in the Turk Stream gas pipeline project, which would completely bypass the Ukrainian pipeline network for gas transit to Europe.
On top of that, Hungary now wants more discussion about the automatic extension of the EU’s sanctions against Russia, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in an interview with Kremlin propaganda channel RT on Sept. 21.
Orban has also been making plenty of pro-Moscow noises in recent weeks.
“We’ve learned a lesson from history,” Orban said at a press conference in the Kremlin on Sept. 18, after meeting with Putin. “When tensions between Eastern and Western Europe grow, Hungarians always suffer. So that is why Hungary stands for the better cooperation between these two parts of the world.”
Ukraine is understandably deeply concerned by such talk. Russia has been coordinating its actions against Ukraine with Hungary, with Budapest continuing to block Ukraine’s further integration with the EU and NATO, according to Vasyl Bodnar, the deputy foreign minister of Ukraine responsible for ties with Hungary.
Putin said on Sept. 18 that he discussed Ukraine with Orban, but revealed no details, while Orban would not comment on the issue, Orban’s press service told the Kyiv Post by email on Sept. 21.
Interests
Nevertheless, Bodnar said, Russia and Hungary both have their own interests in Ukraine. Russia has occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and has waged war on Ukraine in the eastern Donbas since 2014.
Moscow is now using growing tensions between Ukraine and Hungary to destabilize Ukraine on its western border — Zakarpattya Oblast, which is home to some 100,000 ethnic Hungarians. In February Russia was behind two attacks on a Hungarian cultural center in Zakarpattya in order to fuel the conflict between two countries, Ukraine’s SBU security service claims.
The tensions between Ukraine and Hungary, a 9.8 million-nation on Ukraine’s western border, first flared up in September 2017, when the Ukrainian parliament introduced legislation that makes Ukrainian the only language of education in the country’s state schools.
Although the new language law was aimed mostly at cutting the influence of the Russian language, it angered Hungary, which saw it as suppressing its minority in Ukraine.
In response, Budapest started blocking Ukraine’s further integration with NATO and the EU.
That, Bodnar said, was seen in Ukraine as a move in favor of the Kremlin, which has drawn a red line against Ukraine joining NATO.
“I thought it was strange, because Budapest says its main goal in Ukraine is to protect the Hungarian minority,” Bodnar said. “But inside NATO, Ukraine would be a safer place to live in. So the Hungarian minority would also be better protected.”
Hungarian experts denied Hungary’s conflict with Ukraine has anything to do with Russia.
“The defense of the educational and cultural rights of Hungarian minorities is a principal point of basic Hungarian identity, and you simply haven’t understood it since 1918,” Pal Tamas, a Hungarian sociologist and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, told the Kyiv Post on Sept. 21.
Residents of the Ukrainian town of Berehove cross a road near a traffic sign that shows distance to the nearest checkpoints on the Ukrainian-Hungarian border on Oct. 18, 2016. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Historical trauma
Ukraine, in contrast, didn’t see the new law as suppressing any national minorities. Quite to the contrary: the legislation is designed to give Ukrainian citizens of Hungarian origin better chances of integrating, Bodnar said.
“At the moment young Ukrainian Hungarians, who usually don’t speak Ukrainian, only have a future in Hungary. We must give them equal rights with all other Ukrainians, the choice to stay in Ukraine and have a future here,” he added.
Tamas said Hungary used to have similar conflicts with Romania, the Slovak Republic and Serbia –neighboring countries that Hungary lost parts of its territory to after World War I.
“This is an issue that historically mobilizes the average Hungarian on the street, even those who have a very bad opinion about Putin and the Kremlin. This time the (language) conflict was initiated by Kyiv,” Tamas said.
He pointed to the Treaty of Trianon, the 1920 peace treaty between Hungary and the Allied Powers that formally ended World War I, under which Hungary lost swathes of territory to its neighbors, engendering bitterness to this day.
After the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I, the newly emerged state of Hungary lost two thirds of the territory inhabited by Hungarians to Romania, Serbia and the Slovak Republic.
Territories in Zakarpattya, now in Ukraine, were assigned to Czechoslovakia, which in turn lost them to the Soviet Union after World War II.
As of 2013, there were 1.2 million Hungarians living in Romania, some 459,000 in the Slovak Republic, and 251,000 in Serbia.
Hungary in the past fought for more autonomy for its diasporas in these countries, Tamas said.
“In different forms, similar conflicts were resolved there with respect to minority schooling, Hungarian educational autonomy,” Tamas said.
“Our difficult history is being used by Hungarian politicians to win political points,” Bodnar said in response.
Passport scandal
Orban since winning a third term in a landslide victory in April 2018 has been pursuing nationalist-conservative policies, but Hungarians living abroad have been one of his government’s main focuses since soon after he came to power in 2010.
At that time, Hungary adopted a simplified procedure for granting Hungarian citizenship. In 2018 Orban personally congratulated the one millionth foreign holder of a Hungarian passport, a 36-year-old Serb farmer of Hungarian origin.
In turn, the passport-holding diaspora Hungarians gained the right to vote, and most of them supported Orban’s Fidesz-KNDP party in the April elections, which has helped the Hungarian leader consolidate his grip on power.
With more than two thirds of the seats in the 199-seat Hungarian parliament, Fidesz has enough votes to alter the country’s constitution.
In Zakarpattya, where Hungarians make up some 10 percent of the multiethnic region of one million people, Hungary has issued more than 94,000 Hungarian passports to Ukrainian-Hungarians. Dual citizenship is forbidden in Ukraine, Bodnar said.
The Ukrainian government has asked Budapest many times to name those of its citizens to whom it issued Hungarian passports, but in vain.
And as it emerged on Sept. 19, officials at Hungarian consulates in Ukraine instruct new Hungarian passport holders to hide the fact that they have a second passport.
A video showing officials in the Hungarian consulate in Berehove, a city in Zakarpattya Oblast, asking residents not to inform the Ukrainian authorities about their new second passports, which appeared online on Sept. 19, has caused more ill-feeling between the two countries.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin threatened to expel the Hungarian consul in Berehove from Ukraine on Sept. 20.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Szijjarto said that if that happened, a Ukrainian consul in Hungary would be expelled in return, but he also said he hoped that the dispute would be solved in a more diplomatic way.
Speaking to the origo.hu news website on Sept. 23, he said the Ukrainian secret services had conducted a special operation in a consulate of Hungary, a NATO member country, to film the video.
“Dual citizenship is a normal practice in the EU. Ukraine should have known this,” Szijjarto said.
Bodnar said Ukrainian diplomats also want to resolve the conflict with Hungary with the minimum further damage to already shaky bilateral relations.
“To be clear. If a person wants to get a Hungarian passport, it’s his or her right,” Bodnar said. “But there’s a legitimate mechanism for that.
One must inform the authorities and give up one’s Ukrainian citizenship.”
Unfortunately, Ukrainian diplomats neglected to press Budapest on the dual citizenship question, as they were reluctant to spoil relations with Hungary, Bodnar said.
“As a result, now we have to solve a very difficult problem that was previously ignored for too long. That has allowed Hungary to continue extending its presence in Zakarpattya.”
Expansion
Hungary’s influence in the region is indeed strong. Budapest has been granting citizenship, financing local businesses, supporting Hungarian educational establishments, and providing humanitarian aid. Hungary is also expanding its influence in local media.
On Sept. 19, the Hungarian Cultural Association of Zakarpattya bought a 50 percent stake in local TV channel “21 Uzhhorod” using grant money from the Hungarian government.
The TV channel was renamed “Ungvar 21” for a Hungarian speaking audience.
Zoltan Kulin, the head of “Ungvar 21,” told the detector media news website on Sept. 19 that the rebranded channel will broadcast in Ukrainian and Hungarian languages and focus on the life of Hungarians in Zakarpattya.
But although Hungary’s expansion in Zakarpattya recalls the methods used by the Kremlin ahead of its occupation of part of the Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine is not worried that it might lose another part of its territory to an imperialistic neighbor.
“Ethnic Hungarians in Zakarpattya can’t speak Ukrainian, and associate themselves with Hungary. But neither their organizations nor Budapest has openly called for Zakarpattya to be returned to Hungary, as Russia did with Crimea,” Bodnar said.
From West to Russia
However, Budapest’s behavior is not just rankling Kyiv, but the rest of the EU as well: Orban has faced criticism and even the threat of Hungary being stripped of its voting rights in the EU because of his increasingly authoritarian rule.
On Sept. 12 the majority of European Parliament voted to start triggering the Article 7 procedure against Hungary. Budapest could now face sanctions and be stripped its voting rights — if all 28 EU member states support the decision.
The vote came after lawmaker Judith Sargentini presented a report proving that Orban’s government was silencing independent media, targeting NGO’s, removing independent judges, and taking other measures that undermine democracy.
Szijjarto has already called the report a form of revenge by pro-immigration politicians for Budapest’s tough stance on immigration. In June, the Hungarian government passed a series of laws that criminalize the provision of any help to individuals or any group of illegal immigrants seeking asylum in Hungary.
The passing of that legislation prompted European human rights organizations to close their offices in Hungary.
Hungary is now in conflict with Kyiv, Brussels but not Moscow.
Still, these are separate issues, Tamas insisted. In Ukraine, the conflict concerns the protection of language and culture.
“And Brussels is defending a liberal worldview and world order that Orban and many others are attacking,” Tamas said.
Bodnar also said it was too soon to say Hungary was siding with Russia. But the signs worry him. “And it’s not just (the issue of) NATO.
Look at the sanctions on Russian as well. Everybody in the EU is standing together for Ukraine, but Hungary is deepening its cooperation with Russia in the nuclear sphere” Bodnar said.
“Russia might use big energy projects like the Paks Nuclear Power Plant reconstruction to extend its influence in Europe.”
