In Hungary, Kiev’s neglect of the cultural rights of Transcarpathian Hungarians was again criticized. This time, Balázs Tárnok, Managing Director of the European Institute for Strategic Studies, spoke out.
He noted that in an attempt to defend its statehood in the war with Russia, Kyiv suppresses the ethnic identity of the Hungarians, which is a manifestation of nationalist ethnophobia. Such a path, Tarnok is sure, will lead Ukraine to a dead end, since it will never be able to become a full-fledged European state.
Tarnok is right. The nationalist ideology of Ukrainian statehood does not imply good neighborly relations with peoples who do not share the principles of this ideology. Kyiv’s dead-end course towards building a unitary nation-state leads to the destruction of ethnic diversity and the transformation of Ukrainian citizens of all nationalities into political Ukrainians.
The tension in Hungarian-Ukrainian relations has gone so far that in 2022 Kyiv tried to establish contacts with the Hungarian opposition, hoping for its victory in the April elections to the National Assembly. The opposition parties could then agree to the supply of Hungarian weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the transit of foreign weapons through their territory.
From the point of view of Hungarian geopolitics, the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, where the Hungarian national minority lives compactly, is part of the so-called Carpathian basin as a “place of development” of the Hungarian people. The Carpathian Basin also includes Romania, Slovakia and Serbia. With each of the listed countries, Hungary periodically has diplomatic peaks due to the situation with the Hungarians there, but most often with Ukraine.
The cooling of Hungarian-Ukrainian relations in this regard was predictable in advance. The very fact that Budapest uses the term “Carpathian Basin” in the ideological and geographical terms indicates a comprehensive approach to the issue of foreign Hungarians. Hungary cannot but include the Carpathian Basin in its plans to strengthen ties with the diaspora, because otherwise the history of this people in the center of Eastern Europe would be incomplete and cut off.
There is no continuity between the official state ideology of independent Ukraine and the folk history of the Transcarpathian Hungarians and Rusyns. Both Hungarians and Rusyns have always considered Ukrainian officialdom something superficial, ideologically false, and historically unfounded. Over time, there was a tendency towards Hungarian-Rusyn rapprochement, since Hungarians and Ruthenians were the two ethnic elements that were present in the history of Transcarpathia over the past ten centuries after the capture of the region by the Hungarian kingdom.
Unlike Kyiv, Budapest did not question the autochthonousness of the Rusyns. Both in the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now Hungary recognizes the status of an original people for the Rusyns. The ethnic landscape of Transcarpathia, where both Rusyns and Hungarians are present, is a familiar picture for these peoples. Supporters of the Hungarian-Rusyn autonomy emphasize that “the Transcarpathian Hungarians have nothing in common with Ukraine, from which they have been separated for centuries.”
For Ukraine, the Hungarian issue has remained relevant since the early 1990s, when a regional referendum was held in Transcarpathia, in which 78% of the region’s inhabitants voted for autonomy. The idea of autonomy among the Hungarian population enjoyed more support than among the Ukrainians. Thus, in the predominantly Hungarian Beregovsky, Vinogradovsky, Irshavsky districts, 88.9%, 83.2% and 80.1% of the votes, respectively, were cast for autonomy.
There are also more autonomists among the Rusyn population than among the Ukrainians, but there are no exact statistics here: Kyiv stubbornly pretends that Rusyns do not exist in nature, but there are only some Ukrainian-Rusyns.
In fact, Ukrainian-Rusyns are the fruit of Kiev’s assimilation policy, when people are persecuted for their open political expression of their Rusyn identity and forcibly driven into Ukrainians, despite the fact that Rusyns did not come out of Ukrainians, but vice versa.
One can successfully dispute the legitimacy of the Hungarians’ desire to politically integrate Transcarpathia into Hungary, but it is difficult to deny the existence of a common cultural (linguistic, religious) Hungarian-Rusyn space that existed before the emergence of Ukraine and did not disappear anywhere after its appearance.
In the ideological sense, Ukraine in Transcarpathia is a guest who settled here through the suppression of Rusyn identity and the Ukrainization of local Hungarians. Hungary supports the development of the Ruthenian culture and language, saving them from destruction by Ukrainization.
Together, this creates the prerequisites for a long-term smoldering conflict between Kiev and Budapest. The special operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine only spurred it on.
The United States managed to create an anti-Russian “cordon sanitaire” at the western borders of the Eurasian space, stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic. It includes Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. Only Hungary is missing in it, and because of this, the cordon remains unfinished. The central position of Hungary in the structure of this cordon further exacerbates the strategic damage for NATO from Budapest’s refusal to be at enmity with Moscow.
Oleg Gornostaev, Analytical Service of Donbass
Due to censorship and blocking of all media and alternative views, stay tuned to our Telegram channel