(Uzhhorod) A “constructive” meeting: the Ukrainian and Hungarian foreign ministers met on Monday in western Ukraine to try to ease tensions, in the run-up to a European summit aimed at unblocking the aid to Ukraine which Budapest opposes.
“I want to emphasize the main point of this conversation: frankness, sincerity and constructiveness,” declared Dmytro Kouleba during a press conference near Uzhhorod, after a meeting lasting more than six hours with his counterpart Peter Szijjarto.
A sign of the difficult relations between the two neighbors, this was the Hungarian official’s first visit to Ukraine since the launch of the Russian offensive, while he has visited Moscow several times.
Objective: prepare a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in order to “find solutions” to their differences, according to Kyiv.
“A high-level meeting makes sense if it can lead to concrete results. We have taken encouraging first steps today, but we still have a long way to go,” warned Mr. Szijjarto, while saying he was “ready to do this work.”
Viktor Orban is the only European leader to have maintained close ties with the Kremlin, while maintaining complicated relations with Ukraine.
Minority rights
In December he blocked the payment of aid of 50 billion euros over four years to Ukraine. Negotiations are underway to find a compromise in Brussels, where an extraordinary summit is planned for Thursday.
No information has filtered out on this subject, the Hungarian minister referring to the negotiations in Brussels given that “this is not a bilateral question”.
Hungary also stood out from its partners by refusing to approve the EU’s opening of accession negotiations with Ukraine, leaving the room at the time of the vote in mid-December.
And Mr. Orban continues to repeat that Ukraine cannot win the war against Russia, pleading for ceasefire negotiations with Moscow.
The quarrel between the two countries is not new and diplomatic relations had already deteriorated before the invasion, because Ukraine has adopted a series of controversial measures since 2017, notably on the teaching of the Ukrainian language.
In the interest of appeasement, Kyiv recently adopted a law protecting the rights of minorities in Ukraine, a step welcomed Monday by Peter Szijjarto.
A “special commission” will be set up to study the recriminations in Budapest and “put an end to” this matter.
More than 100,000 Magyars live in Transcarpathia, a region in far western Ukraine which was under the control of Budapest until the First World War.