Hungarian President visited President Zelensky in Kyiv

Hungarian President Katalin Novák visited a kindergarten and school being rebuilt with Hungarian support in the village of Zahaltsy, near Kyiv, laid a wreath at a memorial site for the victims of the Russia-Ukraine war and held talks with Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights on Wednesday.

On the second day of her visit to Ukraine, Novák visited Kyiv after spending her first day in Transcarpathia. Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, told the president about the repatriation and rehabilitation of Ukrainian children taken to Russia. Novák noted that Hungary was undertaking the largest humanitarian operation in its history, as part of which it devoted special attention to organising summer camps for Ukrainian children.

Lubinets thanked Novák for the help Hungary had provided to Ukraine since the start of the war. “Hard times will always reveal true friends,” he said, adding that Hungary had been among the first countries to take in tens and later hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, providing them the care they needed, for which all Hungarians deserved gratitude. At the talks, Novák touched on the issue of the educational and linguistic rights of the Transcarpathian Hungarian minority. Lubinets told MTI’s correspondent that there was no problem with talks with the Hungarian side, adding that “everyone has to take care of the rights of their citizens”.

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Novák later visited localities near Kyiv which were directly affected by the fighting in the first weeks of the war. In the village of Moshchun, she attended a ceremony commemorating the Ukrainian soldiers who fell defending the capital. She then visited Bucha where mass graves with dozens of bodies were uncovered after the city was liberated last year. A memorial site was created in the garden of the local Orthodox church, where the president laid a wreath.

Early in the afternoon, Novák visited the village of Zahaltsy, where a kindergarten and school building is being rebuilt with a contribution from the Hungarian government under the coordination of Hungarian Interchurch Aid (HIA). Until the reconstruction is complete, the children are looked after in a modern kindergarten building inaugurated in the spring, also through the support of HIA.

HIA President László Lehel said the organisation is currently helping more than half a million people in Ukraine. Last year, HIA spent more than 10 billion forints (EUR 26.1m) on humanitarian aid in the country, he added. Later in the afternoon, Novák is scheduled to attend the Third Summit of the Crimea Platform at the invitation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.