Foreign minister: Brussels wants to sacrifice Transcarpathia Hungarian community for Ukraine

Budapest, March 17 (MTI)—The EU is willing to sacrifice the Transcarpathian Hungarian community and its rights for Ukraine’s “lightning” accession, the foreign minister Péter Szijjártó said after a meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels on Monday.

The Ukrainian foreign minister, Szijjártó told a press conference, had called the status of the community “an artificial issue” at the meeting, and this was “totally unacceptable”. Equally intolerable was that several EU member states had backed the Ukrainian minister’s position, a ministry statement quoted Szijjarto as saying, adding that some had even questioned whether Hungary had “the right to assess the situation of the Hungarian community in Transcarpathia (Kárpátalja) at all”. “We do not accept anyone denying our right to assess the legal situation of our national community,” he added.

Szijjártó said his German and Austrian counterparts had “tried to educate him” about Kyiv’s recent achievements in this area, arguing that the Hungarian minority’s rights were in fact respected. But their rights, he said, had been “systematically violated” over ten years, adding that Hungary’s government would continue to staunchly insist on the restoration of their rights.

Ukraine’s accession negotiations would not get anywhere “until the rights of the Hungarian national community are fully restored”, he said. Also, Hungarians would decide whether Ukraine joined the bloc when a referendum soon takes place in Hungary,” he added.

Szijjártó said a unanimous decision by members of both the EU and NATO was necessary to allow a state to join the organisations. Hungary, he added, was not the one who was waiting to join an organisation of which Ukraine was already a member, rather it was “the other way around”.

In this article, we wrote that it would be a huge step for Transcarpathian Hungarians if Ukraine were in the EU, but this is not the position of the government: Ukraine’s EU referendum in Hungary: why is Orbán’s costly push worth it?