Putin: region Hungarians live in is old Russian land

“Russia engaged in a battle for its historic borders”, President Vladimir Putin told tens of thousands of his people at a grandiose patriotic concert in Moscow yesterday. However, those borders changed in the last few centuries. The question is what now Moscow regards its historic border. But the answer might sound terrifying to most Hungarian ears.

Russia does not know its borders

Attila Demkó, a well-known Hungarian author, security policy expert and former diplomat, said that even the Russians cannot tell which their historic borders are. That is because the Moscow-centered state never found its natural geographic boundaries. That resulted in catastrophes sometimes for the Russians and many times for the neighbouring peoples. That is why Hungary was forced to become part of the Soviet Union-led Eastern, Communist block for 45 years after WWII.

And that is true for Russia’s western borders and for its outskirts in the Caucasus, Far East and Kazakhstan.

Gellért Rajcsányi, a Hungarian journalist, therefore, argues that Russia’s borders are where Moscow wants them to be. And that is bad news for the Hungarians if we believe what Putin said and wrote.

Putin thinks Transcarpathia must be Russian

In 2021, the Russian President shared a paper about “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. Among others, he clears that Transcarpathia, where more than 150,000 Hungarians live, is an old Russian land. He wrote that, in the 18th century, when Russia, Prussia and Austria partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Moscow regained “the western Old Russian lands, except for Galicia and Transcarpathia, which became part of the Austrian – and later Austro-Hungarian – Empire”.