According to the local Hungarian news outlet, one of the Hungarians gave a Hungarian passport to the border guards (many Transcarpathian Hungarians obtain Hungarian citizenship, too); however, the authorities did not care. At the moment, the two boys are waiting somewhere in the military district of Ungvár/Uzhhorod
to be transported to one of Ukraine’s military camps.
KárpátHír wrote that in the last few weeks there have been man reports that Ukrainian authorities tried to conscript young people by force in many parts of Ukraine. For example, in Kherson, a seaport inhabited by Russians and Ukrainians, military officials tried to deliver drafts to the workers of a ship factory at its entrance – origo.hu reported.
As it is showed below in video uploaded on Facebook, Ukrainian soldiers appeared at the entrance of the factory accompanied by police officers and announced that they will deliver drafts:
They asked the people working in the factory how old they are and those who were in the right age group (18-45) were given a draft and were harshly ordered to go with the soldiers. Furthermore, military and police officers tried to
hustle out on the street those who resisted.
They were defended only by the workers and the porters of the factory.
As we reported before, Tamás Menczer, state secretary for communications and international relations said that the first statements by the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, are the reason for “cautious hope”. He added that Hungary always pursued good neighbourly relations with Ukraine and it had, until recently, supported Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations, as well as visa its liberalisation efforts. However, “the language law approved during the time of the previous president was a stab in the back because it aimed at suppressing minority languages in all areas of life.”
The law makes the use of Ukrainian compulsory as an official language and bans the use of all minority languages including Hungarian. Therefore, Hungarian organisations in the Carpathian Basin and the Hungarian government protested against the legislation saying that it eliminated all of the minorities’ rights to the use of their own language.
