Following a meeting with decorated senior officers of the Russian navy, Russian President Vladimir Putin once again hinted that Hungary could regain territory from Ukraine. According to the Russian president, Ukraine will “sooner or later lose” these lands.
Could Hungary receive territory from Ukraine?
In recent years, President Putin has seized every opportunity to weaken and divide NATO and the European Union, which he regards as his principal European adversaries. In doing so, he has not limited himself to attempting to redraw Ukraine’s eastern borders. He has also voiced opinions on the country’s western frontiers, apparently in the hope of finding political parties willing to revive grievances rooted in the period between the two world wars or in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Hungary, this approach proved successful at the time.
Speaking after a meeting with several decorated officers of the Russian navy, Putin said he was convinced that Ukraine would eventually lose its western territories.
“These territories once belonged to Poland, Hungary and Romania. Sooner or later – not tomorrow, perhaps not the day after tomorrow, but in one, two, ten or fifteen years – history will ultimately put everything back in its proper place,” said the Russian president, who launched the invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022.
Putin seeks to divide and rule
There is a reason why Putin is trying to stir unrest behind Ukraine’s front lines. According to military reports, Ukraine’s drone forces have achieved such battlefield superiority that they are now capable of seriously disrupting Russia’s rear areas. A war that only a few years ago seemed distant to the residents of Moscow and St Petersburg has become a reality, with Ukrainian strikes capable of disabling ports, military bases and critical energy infrastructure for extended periods.
It is therefore hardly surprising that thousands of Russians now find themselves queuing for petrol – if they can obtain any at all – something virtually unheard of in recent decades.
We have rejected the idea before
This is not the first time Russian leaders have spoken about partitioning Ukraine. Former president Dmitry Medvedev previously shared a map illustrating such a scenario. Unsurprisingly, the proposal allocated Transcarpathia to Hungary, as the region belonged to Hungary until 1918 and again between 1938/39 and 1944. Around Berehove, a Hungarian community of approximately 60,000 to 70,000 people still lives today.
However, that community now accounts for only around five per cent of the population of Ukraine’s westernmost region. The same map also envisaged territorial gains for Romania and Poland.
On 4 November 2022, Putin had already suggested that these territories could be returned to the states concerned. Poland and Romania quickly and firmly rejected the proposal. The Orbán government responded later, but likewise rejected the idea, stating that such declarations were not what was needed and that the priority should instead be a ceasefire and peace negotiations. The Tisza government has not yet commented on Putin’s latest remarks.
In Hungary, meanwhile, a persistent myth has circulated since the democratic transition that Mikhail Gorbachev offered Transcarpathia to the Antall government in settlement of Soviet debt, but that Hungary’s political leadership rejected the proposal and instead became the first country to recognise the territorial integrity of the newly independent Ukraine. Since then, numerous studies – as well as those directly involved – have refuted this claim.
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Kremlin: Putin and Orbán never held talks in Russian
Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán always conducted their talks through interpreters and never conversed in Russian, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Peskov was asked about the matter after Viktor Orbán quoted the Russian title of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat?) during his speech at the Tusványos Summer University on Saturday, attracting the attention of the Russian media.
“To be honest, I believe he was simply quoting the title of the work. He is an educated man,” Peskov said.
“The negotiations were never conducted in Russian; they always took place with the assistance of interpreters,” the spokesman added in the interview, as quoted by Russian news agencies.
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