House Speaker: The entire nation is behind Transcarpathian Hungarians

Ukrainian politicians must know that the entire Hungarian nation is behind the Transcarpathian Hungarian community, and the Hungarian state will not give up protecting their interests despite any pressure, Speaker of Parliament László Kövér said in Budapest on Friday.

In his opening address to the Forum of Hungarian Lawmakers from the Carpathian Basin (KMKF), Kövér said there was no separate cause for Hungarians living beyond the borders and those within, only a unified Hungarian nation and a unified Hungarian cause, MTI reported.

Kövér emphasised that the matter of the Transcarpathian Hungarians was not merely a minority issue, but an existential issue in the strictest sense of the word, just as that of the native minority communities, which make up more than a tenth of the European population, was not only a moral issue, but one of realpolitik. What is happening today to European national minorities can happen tomorrow to the majority nations as well, Kövér said.

He also pointed out that after the conclusion of the war in Ukraine, it would not be possible to rebuild the European security policy architecture without a fair settlement of the issue of national rights. In the absence of this, any new European security concept is only built on sand, he said.

Kövér argued that the war in Ukraine did not begin with the first Russian gunshot in February last year, but when leading Russian politicians questioned the independence of the Ukrainian nation, the existence of an independent Ukrainian language and culture, openly expressing the idea that what claims to be Ukraine must be Russified. At the same time, the speaker posed the question of what happens if the victim also questions the ethnic reality of others and tries to restrict and eliminate it.