Hungarian minority in Ukraine is Orban’s plaything

Neighbors are skeptical about Budapest’s activities. The status of the Hungarian minority remains a hot topic in bilateral relations. There were provocations from all sides. Hungary’s government is not demanding any adjustment to the state borders that were set around 100 years ago. At the level of symbolic politics, however, the country is very much geared towards revisionist ideas.

Relations with Ukraine have therefore been tense not only since Putin’s invasion in February. Orban’s ambivalent attitude has worsened relations since then: he condemned the invasion and reluctantly supported what he called “catastrophic” sanctions against Moscow. Still, he’s not convinced. The European dwarf is sanctioning the Russian giant, Orban said in Berlin at the beginning of the week, “the dwarf is dying”.

He sees the West’s overall strategy as a failure. The EU must stay out of the war and “stand between Russia and Ukraine,” he announced in a speech in July.

This neutrality coincides with the Hungarian prime minister’s relativizing of Russian war crimes, limiting support for Ukraine to humanitarian aspects, and showing a great deal of sympathy for Moscow’s “security claims”.

Kyiv therefore sees Hungary as Putin’s Trojan horse. A Foreign Ministry spokesman even accused Orban of “Russian propaganda”.

From Budapest’s point of view, however, the reticence in Ukraine policy is rational, because the government thinks strictly in terms of domestic politics. In addition to cheap energy supplies from Moscow, she prioritizes the protection of the Hungarian minority in the Ukrainian border region of Transcarpathia. “We cannot make a decision that targets Hungarian settlements or people,” is Orban’s reasoning for Hungary staying out of the war.

Distrust of the Hungarians

Instead of protecting them, however, Orban’s seesaw policy between East and West has maneuvered the minority in Transcarpathia into a tricky situation: They are suspected of not being loyal to the Ukrainian state, to which they obviously feel little affiliation. Important representatives of the minority have further fueled the distrust. The vice rector of the Hungarian-financed university in Berehove, western Ukraine, told the New York Times that Moscow only wanted to use the war to protect the Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.

In the Transcarpathian House in Kisvarda, in the midst of relief supplies for refugees from the neighboring country, the director Laszlo Bodrog welcomes them. In Hungary’s border areas, five such institutions support minorities with cultural, networking and educational programs. Budapest feeds the houses with tax money.

Independent but close to Fidesz, local politician Bodrog has his own perspective on the Carpathian arc. He sees it as a once homogeneous, Hungarian-dominated area, fragmented by the political upheavals in the first half of the 20th century. There were also many connections across the border in his family, which were severed after the incorporation of Transcarpathia into the Soviet Union after the Second World War. “It was an injustice that was not allowed to be talked about under communism.”

The 53-year-old Bodrog does not consider the fact that Hungary “brought back” parts of the region between 1938 and 1944, not least through its cooperation with Nazi Germany, to be a decisive argument. “Before that, Transcarpathia belonged to the Hungarian kingdom for centuries.” The local Slavic population does not consist of Ukrainians, but of Rusins. These see themselves as a separate nation and are recognized as a minority in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. Kyiv denies them this right.

Passports and education from Budapest

Bodrog points out that Kyiv promised Budapest in 1992 to grant autonomy rights to the Hungarian minority. The question of whether these should be limited to matters of culture and national symbols or whether they should also include the creation of a separate autonomous area is still controversial today. However, political movements that demanded such a territory have been marginalized since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 at the latest.

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The struggles of recent years have therefore focused on education and citizenship. Since 2011, Budapest has been generously issuing passports to members of the minority in neighboring countries – 94,000 to Ukraine with 124,000 applications by 2015 alone. Considering that 150,000 people there identified themselves as ethnic Hungarians in the last census in 2001, this is a significant proportion.

Ukraine does not allow dual citizenship, but does not actively penalize it either. The political damage is still done: “The issue of passports has poisoned relations,” admits even Bodrog.

In 2017 Ukraine passed a new law on education. Its aim was to strengthen the constitutionally enshrined state language Ukrainian and to limit the use of Russian in schools. However, it was formulated so imprecisely that it also affected other languages.

This would have restricted the use of Hungarian after the fourth grade, running counter to Budapest’s efforts to maintain a Hungarian-language system up to high school. In 2020, as a result of international criticism, Kyiv revised the law and made the use of languages ​​more flexible.

Although not yet in force, this law has had a devastating impact on bilateral relations. Both sides expelled diplomats, and Hungary partially blocked Kiev’s rapprochement with NATO. The then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko exploited the issue in his election campaign, which he campaigned under the slogan “Army. Language. faith” led. The country’s far-right splinter groups agitated against the Hungarian minority, with experts also suspecting Russian provocations.

Today there is a suspicious silence between the capitals, says Dmitro Tuschanski. “There is no more dialogue. When I talk about the Hungarian minority in Kyiv, they mistake me for Orban’s spy. In Budapest, I’m considered a Ukrainian nationalist.” The head of the Institute for Central European Strategy is the typical product of a border country: married to a Hungarian, son of Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking parents, with Jewish and Polish roots.

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Tuschanski avoids one-sided blame, but still has a clear opinion. Both sides have used the difficult relationship politically in recent years. However, the 35-year-old finds Orban in particular to be provocative: “His rhetoric and manipulation are counterproductive.”

Orban alienates the minority from the state in which they live. Since they also consume almost exclusively Hungarian media, they uncritically adopt positions that are sometimes indistinguishable from those of the Kremlin: “The fact that Ukraine is not a real country is part of the mainstream in Hungary.”

However, the fact that Hungary has to give its minority so much support and that it keeps its distance from Ukraine has to do with Kyiv’s neglect. Zakarpattia is one of the most underdeveloped regions of the country.

Residents leave Zakarpattia

The minority has been shrinking for many years. Tuschanski blames the poor social conditions. “The simultaneous issue of EU passports reinforces this development.” As early as 2017, a study funded by the Hungarian government concluded that 130,000 people still identify themselves as belonging to the Hungarian minority, a decrease of 20,000 from the census 16 years earlier.

Now the war is deepening the problem: Tuschanski estimates that 70,000 to 100,000 ethnic Hungarians still remain in Ukraine because of the flight movement after the invasion. Local politician Bodrog even assumes only 60,000.

Those who are still there also complain that refugees from eastern Ukraine are moving into the villages, which increases the fear of their own disappearance. “Transcarpathia is lost for the Hungarians,” concludes Bodrog somberly. In any case, the cultivation of folklore and jousting tournaments in East Hungarian museums are no substitute for a surviving minority.

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