Over 100 thousand Hungarians might permanently leave Ukraine due to the war
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Gábor László Vasárus, a Hungarian geographer, analysed the social and geographical reasons and results of the war in Ukraine. At the joint event of the Hungarian Humanist Association and the Grand Café of Szeged, he said that Ukraine’s geography and weather hinder Russian advancement. He added that Hungary should calculate multiple economic effects, and Hungarians living in Ukraine might leave Transcarpathia (Kárpátalja) forever.
Successful pro-Ukrainian campaigns
According to telex.hu, Vasárus said that Ukraine had the third biggest nuclear arsenal in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union. Kyiv disarmed them in return for Russian, British and US guarantees regarding its territorial integrity. He highlighted that the past decades of Ukraine were not a success story. Its population decreased from 52 million to 41.5 million.
Regional differences remained. The east, where the Russian minority lives, is still more developed than the west. However, society has been decaying in the east, the abortion numbers are high, and alcoholism is a significant issue. Based on surveys, one out of three high school students regularly drinks alcohol. Interestingly, Kyiv’s pro-Ukrainian propaganda was effective among them in the last few years. As a result, most Russians in Ukraine support Kyiv more than Moscow. That is what President Putin often calls Nazism.
Crimea’s Russian population did not turn against the Russian invaders in 2014, but that pro-Moscow behaviour disappeared in Kharkiv or Mariupol this February and March.
I think that the DNH needs to be a bit more careful with its terminology. The word ‘disappear’ in the context of people en masse is usually used in relation to people that are missing, presumed dead, at the hands of a government and its secret police as in what took place in Chile under General Pinochet. The people discussed in the article may leave Ukraine, possibly on a permanent basis, but they will most certainly not ‘disappear’.