The tortuous approval of the sixth package of European sanctions against Russia has once again highlighted the power it has gained Hungary when molding the European Union response to the Kremlin aggression in Ukraine. Brussels has ended up making concessions to accommodate the interests of Budapest which, with its veto threat, ended up decaffeinating the oil embargo comprehensive approach that most community leaders aspired to. The Hungarian annoyance is not new, but it has been accentuated during this war by the ideological harmony that its prime minister, the populist Victor Orbánkeep with Vladimir Putin and your country’s energy dependence on Russia. An equation to which another element should be added: the ambitions of Hungarian ultranationalism in Ukraine and the opportunities this war could bring.
Ukraine has a small hungarian minorityabout 150,000 people concentrated in the western region of Transcarpathiawhere they constitute the 12% of the population. The region was part of Kingdom of Hungary (and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) until 1920, when its defeat in the First World War resulted in the loss of two-thirds of its territory and half of its population, a dismemberment sealed in the Treaty of Trianon. The trauma is still alive in part of Hungarian society and has served for the successive governments in Budapest to make it a state policy to preserve the Hungarian identity, culture or language among their diasporaspread over several countries in central and eastern Europe.
Also in Ukraine, a very guaranteeing State regarding the rights of its minorities until Russia began to eat up its territory in 2014 with the annexation of crimea and the armed revolt in the donbas. Three years later, kyiv passed a new educational law. This law allows minorities to be educated in their mother tongue until fourth grade, but from then on Ukrainian gradually gains weight until it becomes the vehicular language in schools and universities. “These changes were not directed against the Hungarian minority, but were designed to derussify the public sphere, from education to the media, and affected all minorities equally & rdquor ;, explains Tadeusz Iwanski, an analyst at the Center for Eastern Studies, based in Warsaw.
From Budapest, however, it was seen as an intolerable affront. The Orban government began to denounce the alleged oppression of the ukrainian hungarians and “extremism” of kyiv, the same script used by Putin to justify many of his actions in Ukraine, although in his case it is the Russian minority that is supposedly persecuted. And as a retaliatory measure, he went on to block the Kyiv’s rapprochement with NATOto the point of vetoing the ministerial meetings of the NATO-Ukraine Commission.
Hungarian investments in Transcarpathia
The train crash escalated when Budapest appointed a delegate with the rank of minister to promoting development in the Ukrainian Transcarpathia, where Hungary has invested hundreds of millions. Not only that. It has also been granting hungarian passports Ukrainians of Magyar origin since 2011 and demanded autonomy for them within the Ukrainian state. “Orban is playing the identity and nationalist charter. It is a geopolitically dangerous game, but internally it serves to present itself as the guardian of the Hungarian nation & rdquor ;, says Dmytro Tuznankyi, director of the Institute for Central European Strategy, who believes that the relationship between the two countries is at its worst since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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And the prospects are not the best because the Kremlin seems to be poisoned the dispute. In recent years there have been several attacks on hungarian cultural centers in the region and periodically they run messages calling put the hungarians to the knife” from Transcarpathia. As Budapest accuses Ukrainian extremists of perpetrating them, there are signs that the Kremlin’s hand may be behind it. A Polish court ruled two years ago that one such attack, which ended up setting a cultural center on fire, was committed by three right-wing pro-Russian Poles.
Ambitions of Hungarian ultranationalism
“In the Hungarian political universe there are some figures who think that territories like Transcarpathia should return to Hungarybut they focus mainly on the extreme right. Those intentions have not yet entered the mainstream & rdquor ;, says Tuznankyi. One of the few surveys carried out in the region concluded in 2018 that 81% of its 1.2 million inhabitants were in favor of remaining part of Ukraine, while 14% suspected that the Hungarian government’s investments in the region could hide the intention of Budapest to eventually seize it.