Ukraine: Zakarpattia Oblast

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Ukraine: Zakarpattia Oblast:

Words by: Bence X. Szechenyi

There is a region in Ukraine, west of the Carpathian Mountains, called Zakarpattia Oblast or Transcarpathia. It used to be a part of Hungary until the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. Since then, it has been a part of Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and now, Ukraine.

Part of the reason so many different nations have claimed Transcarpathia over the years is its ethnic diversity. The region is home to a majority of ethnic Ukrainians, with a minority of Hungarians, Slovakians, Romanians, and Roma people. Hungarians are the largest minority, constituting 12.1% of the total population according to the latest Ukrainian census data from 2001. In 2017, a SUMMA survey counted the Hungarian population of the region as 131,000, but it is likely this number is now lower due to a variety of factors resulting from the Russian invasion.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rages on, this region has been pulled into the international spotlight. The Hungarian government, since well before the war, has been critical of the Ukrainian government’s treatment of the Hungarian minority. This dispute, concerning a rather small population, has been elevated to a geopolitical issue because Hungary, an EU and NATO member state, has withheld complete support for Ukraine, using the alleged oppression of the Hungarian minority as a justification.

The Hungarian government has criticized EU sanctions against Russia, declined to provide military aid, only supplying humanitarian assistance, and refused to allow the transportation of weapons through Hungarian territory. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said he is “on the side of peace,” arguing for ceasefire talks to avoid further escalation. This stands in contrast with the position of Ukraine and many supporting Western countries who pledge to support Ukraine until Russia withdraws all troops.

Orbán and Hungary have received significant criticism from the West for these positions, being depicted as Putin’s ally within the Western fold. In a recent visit to Moscow, China’s president Xi Jinping also advocated for “peace,” presenting a twelve-point plan to end the war. This peace plan is widely understood to be in Russia’s interest as the freezing of the conflict would see Russia secure significant territorial gains and allow them to rebuild their military capacity. Hungary has taken a similar stance towards the invasion as China, presenting a wish for peace which may unwittingly support Russian interests.

Orbán has been invited to Kyiv by the Ukrainian government, hoping to demonstrate the atrocities committed by Russians and explain the need to fight. This trip has not been made. I spoke with a high-ranking Hungarian foreign policy official recently, who will remain anonymous to protect their position, who told me “Hungarian minority protections are the vital first step before Hungary can meet with Ukraine.” The relatively small Hungarian population in Ukraine have thus been elevated to the international spotlight, as their status impacts the cooperation between Hungary and Ukraine, important for EU and NATO proceedings.

The conflict between Hungary and Ukraine over the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia is not new. In 2010, Hungary, under Orbán and his Fidez party, revised its citizenship laws, allowing the Hungarian minority in surrounding countries to receive Hungarian passports. Ukrainian legislation does not recognize dual citizenship but also doesn’t specifically punish citizens for having two passports. This loophole was exploited by the Hungarian population to hold two passports semi-legally, causing a significant clash between the Hungarian and Ukrainian governments.

With much of the Hungarian minority having two passports, being able to freely move to and from Hungary, Transcarpathia’s ethnic divide was likely widened. Not even the time of day is consistent for all the region’s inhabitants. Some residents go by “Budapest time” and other’s by “Kyiv time,” which is an hour ahead.

In 2017, Ukraine instituted new education laws which mandated a percentage of instruction in public schools to be conducted in the Ukrainian language. These actions caused a backlash in Hungary as it was seen as an effort to erase Hungarian identities. These education laws continue to be cited by the Hungarian government as the primary example of the minority’s oppression. Since 2018, Hungary has blocked any high-level meetings between NATO and Ukraine to protest these laws.

Specifically, the laws mandate that from 5^th grade on, 20% of teaching time in public schools must be in Ukrainian. All the way through the 4^th grade, instruction can be entirely in any official EU language. Starting in 9^th grade, the percentage is increased to 40% and then to 60% from the 10^th grade on. Importantly, this is referencing the percentage of total teaching time, allowing the possibility of bilingual education. Additionally, the law is only for public schools, meaning that a private school could teach entirely in any language they please.

The existing ethnic tensions were seized upon by Russian propagandists in an effort to fracture the united defense of Ukraine. There have Russian narratives disseminated which accentuate the conflicts in Transcarpathia, even going so far as saying that Hungary intends to annex the region.

I traveled to Transcarpathia to investigate the reality of life for the Hungarian minority, their feelings on the war, and their opinions on the relationship between the Hungarian and Ukrainian governments. It was important to find out what this small Hungarian population thought about their presence in the international spotlight.

My chief contact, who served as my translator on the trip, is a Hungarian from the region. We would get a ride from Budapest with her mother, her father, and her two sisters. I would then stay at their family home while I conducted my reporting.

On the long car ride across Hungary, towards to border, I sat in silence. The Hungarian-Ukrainian border is very rural, it was dark by the time we got close, and the combination of the darkness, emptiness of landscape, and impending border crossing made my knees shake in the backseat of the crowded SUV.

We pulled up to the Hungarian side of the border crossing and the family reminded one another “first Hungarian passports, then Ukrainian.” The Hungarian border was relaxed, a mall cop looking character checked our passports before waving us through. The trip became real however when we pulled towards the Ukrainian side. A kid in his twenties walked in front of our car with an AK-47 on his back, peering into the front windows. Soldiers collected our passports and took them into a small office. I could see inside but tried not to look because of my nerves.

The family was joking around as we waited, which aggravated me because I was focused on trying to breathe and the laughter was distracting. I would later find out that they were nervous too, “we are always nervous when we cross the border.” Everyone deals with stress their own way. They returned the passports and we continued. As we drove deeper into Ukraine, the mood relaxed in the car. My translator told me later that the border crossing was nerve wracking for them because of the semi-legality of having two passports.

For the rest of the car ride, the family was far more talkative. “Everything is much better now that there is electricity,” the mother told me. At the beginning of the war there was only electricity in the region for a few hours every night. People would use that time to charge batteries, hoping to maintain power throughout the following day. The family described how almost everyone changed their entire daily schedules, sleeping during the day to be awake between one and five in the morning when the power came on.

We passed barracks, long low buildings behind a gate with a tryzub, the Ukrainian coat of arms, made from iron bars at its center. It was a barrack even before the war, I was told. “There were around 780 soldiers stationed there before the war started,” the mother told me. “One of the soldiers we know said that only about 140 are still alive.” This was the first time that the human toll of Russia’s invasion was raised to me in context.

The mother went on to claim that most of Ukraine’s original soldiers had already been killed. “The army is now completely people who were just drafted and sent to the front.” As part of her evidence for this, she told me a story which she would repeat several times throughout the next few days. She had seen a Facebook post purportedly from a mother whose son had been “abducted” by the army, as she put it, and was dead in Bakhmut just four days later. I gripped tight to my passport whenever I was in public. They implanted the fear that even I could be sent to fight if I couldn’t prove I was American.

We arrived at the house and any anxiety dissipated. The house was four walls of Hungarian stereotypes. Outside the house, as decoration, hung a wood carving of the Hungarian coat of arms, tied with a Hungarian flag ribbon. Inside, all the décor was Hungary or Christianity related. There were big crosses, Virgin Mary statues, and a Hungarian flag hung in a frame.

There were multiple maps on the wall of pre-Trianon “big Hungary,” when the country included Transcarpathia as well as a lot of other land that now belongs to neighboring countries. It is a symbol that is controversial, Orbán received backlash for his use of the imagery. Seeing these maps hanging all over the house, I was struck by how offensive it would likely be for a Ukrainian to enter here and see symbols that seem to argue that the place they live as a Ukrainian is actually Hungary.

My translator later explained, “In a minority house you must have a lot of pride. Hungary is always better than Ukraine in our house, so you keep a distance from Ukrainian things.” She illustrated this with an example, “when I was a kid and was eating M&M’s or any colorful candy, I would never let a blue sit next to a yellow in my hand.” From early on, she felt a pressure to stiff-arm any Ukrainian culture or patriotism. Her family had a strong position against assimilation, but also against cultural pluralism in their identities.

Everyone spoke in Hungarian, I was served wine, palinka, and Hungarian food. The only reminder I was in Ukraine was the air raid alerts. These were given momentary attention before everyone continued what they were doing. I was struck by the normalcy.

The next day, my translator’s little cousins and little sister were going to be performing in a Hungarian folk song competition. It would be in the town of Beregszáz in Hungarian or Berehove in Ukrainian, one of the centers of the Hungarian community in Ukraine. So, me, my translator, and the four kids who would be performing boarded into a van marked with logos of Hungarian organizations.

On the ride there I got my first look at the region by daylight. I saw the typical trappings of a post-soviet society. There were the run-down panel apartment buildings with rusting metal playgrounds, crumbling storefronts dating back to the Austro-Hungarian empire, with churches dotting the landscape.

At first, there was little evidence of the war passing by outside, I just saw one billboard out the window with a stern looking soldier on it and “join us” written in Ukrainian. Then, as I was staring out the window at a “Dino Park,” where kids were playing on slides and an animatronic brontosaurus moved its head back and forth, we slowed to a stop. I looked forward and there were several soldiers equipped with machine guns peering into the car in front of us. “A checkpoint,” my translator told me, “Get your passport out.” The soldiers simply waved us on, probably seeing all the children in the van and recognizing the logos on the outside of it. We would pass through checkpoints many times over my visit, and they were always a bit unnerving because of the large guns and stony eyed soldiers, but only once did they check my passport.

When we arrived in Beregszáz/Berehove my translator and I went exploring. There were plenty of people on the street. Children played in the main square; one kid bounced a basketball in a military hat with the Ukrainian flag on it. The street signs were in Hungarian as well as Ukrainian, I saw statues to Hungarian heroes like Rákóczi Ferenc and Petőfi Sándor. The Hungarian school, funded by the Hungarian government, stood at the center of town with a Hungarian and Ukrainian flag flying out front.

At the end of the main walking street of town, there was a large memorial commemorating soldiers who had lost their lives in the war. I was somewhat surprised to see that there were flowers placed in front of it that were tied with ribbons in Hungarian colors as well as Ukrainian. It was a sign of shared solidarity across ethnicities for those fighting off Russian invaders.

At one point, the air raid siren went off. It was loud, everyone could hear it regardless of whether they were inside or outside. No one moved though. Nothing changed, the kids kept playing, the shoppers kept shopping, the people at the café kept chatting. It unsettled me of course, so I looked at the unbothered faces of the Ukrainians to ground myself. My translator, seeing my facial expression said, “it’s not a good feeling, actually. Makes you feel bad in your stomach every single time.” Transcarpathia has not been attacked during the war. The citizens have gotten used to the empty threat posed by the sirens. Logically, they know they can probably continue their day, but as my translator highlighted, the sirens are a reminder that there is danger looming. It is psychologically unsettling. Even if the people in the town don’t cower in bomb shelters, the threat surely takes a toll.

My translator and I walked through and open-air market. It was a sprawling network of stalls selling various goods from sneakers, to perfume, to food. I noticed some Hungarian imports among the wares. There was a building in the center of the winding rows of stalls, that my translator paused in front of.

“They are speaking Hungarian in there,” my translator said gesturing in a side door. I peered into the small room. It consisted of a rickety bar made from plasticky panels with a couple of tables cramped together. Every surface in the place that was meant to be white, like the refrigerator, light fixtures, or electricity sockets, were all yellow. The walls were yellow too, a dark yellow, only interrupted by a ratty red curtain that hung behind one end of the bar.

The source of the voices were two middle aged men dressed in sweatpants and track jackets. One was wearing a hat, the other had his long hair pulled back. The bartender stood behind the bar, a woman in her sixties, with her hair died a shade of lilac.

We entered the place. The door was open, there was no difference in temperature between outside and inside. The men occupied two of the three small tables in the back of the tiny room, we stood at the bar and ordered espressos. My translator struck up a conversation with the bartender. She had a drooping sort of face, a perennial frown which was a departure from the mood imparted by the purple hair.

She was naturally curious about what me and my translator were doing in this hole-in-the-wall. We were at least twenty years younger than any patron that I saw enter the place in the two-hour period we hung out there. We explained how I was an American writer and she was from the region, but now lives in Budapest. This combination of facts identified us as exceptionally rare characters to visit, we were told.

As we stood at the bar, chatting with the bartender, middle aged women periodically came in from the market outside. They would go behind the bar, chat for a second, take a shot of a clear alcohol, and then scurry back out, presumably to their market booth.

The men behind us talked in booming voices. After about twenty minutes they got up and joined us at the bar in need of a refill. The two men had the same name and were celebrating their name day, like a second birthday for many Hungarians. They invited us to join them for a drink. My translator flashed me a look that communicated, drink this cognac out of this dirty glass or you won’t get to interview these men. So, even though it was not yet noon, a cognac was poured for me with a small glass of pomegranate juice on the side. I drank slowly, miserably, and asked the man and his friend what they thought about the war.

These two men were carpenters, or former carpenters, I’m not quite sure. They were in their fifties or so. They both were doing some devoted drinking, but as it was their name day, it’s difficult to tell whether they were marking a special occasion, were alcoholics, or both. It is difficult to know how much stock to put into the opinions of village drunks. On the one hand, no one represents the word on the street better, on the other hand, they may just be drunk. I share their opinions with you now because whether you like it or not, they represent a faction of Hungarians in Transcarpathia.

“This is Hungary!” the man with the hat said, wringing his hands in front of him, “this is Hungarian land since Árpád!” He referenced the Hungarian king who is understood to have led the Hungarians to settle in the Carpathian basin. This belief was fundamental in the construction of all their other political ideology. The war just didn’t specifically concern them, they said, Orbán had it right, the war had nothing to do with Hungary, and thus nothing to do to them. As far as they were concerned, they were Hungarians living in Hungary. They avoided the draft. One of them had not left his house in months, and had his son serving as a lookout for soldiers who might catch him while he drank for his name day. The fear of forcible draft, regardless of whether it was a real threat, was ever-present for these men. It changed the way their lives were lead.

While we talked, the bartender shushed us a few times when politics began to be explicitly spoken about. The US is to blame for the war, they told me, not just Russia. The bartender closed the door after that. I was disappointed by this sentiment and wondered if they were a victim of Russian propaganda. They told me they primarily watched Hungarian news programing.

These men would agree with anything the current Hungarian government said. Orbán, they felt, validates their Hungarian identities. The man with the hat emotionally told us that Ferenc Gyurcsány, the former Hungarian prime minister, had said that Hungarians were only the people that live withing Hungary’s borders, which broke his heart. The pain that caused was apparent, his voice shook, and a tear fell from his glassy eye as he talked about it. We nodded along and eventually left the bar, after more cognac than I would like to ever drink before noon, a bit shocked.

The next day, my translator took me on a tour of the town. It was a beautiful spring day, so the streets were quite crowded. I saw a soldier in uniform having a coffee with a woman, presumably his girlfriend. She stared into the tea in front of her, and flowers rested on the table. He had a hand over hers and was speaking Ukrainian in a low and gentle tone, obviously attempting to comfort her somehow. In Ukraine, young men must leave the people they love. They may never see them again.

That afternoon I was meeting with a Hungarian Ukrainian woman, we will refer to her as Szilvia, who I was referred to by a mutual friend. Ahead of my trip I had reached out to contacts to try to build connections in the region with ordinary people. I wanted to speak to anyone who would speak to me, but many were hesitant. I was repeatedly cautioned by people in the region to maintain the anonymity of my sources. People were legitimately afraid of getting in trouble for something they may say. Many understood free speech to be limited.

Szilvia was eager to meet me, though. My translator’s parents knew her and said, “oh god,” when I told them I would speak to her. Everyone in my translator’s family referred to her as a conspiracy theorist, or someone with an unreliable point of view. One of my translator’s sisters said, “she posts things on Facebook against Hungary.” I had my translator walk me through her Facebook page, and every post we discussed seemed to be simply pro-Ukraine, not anti-Hungary. Her posts were refreshing to see from my point of view, she seemed to hold the Western understanding of the war, which was a pleasant departure from the “this is Hungary,” attitude of the men in the bar. It was concerning that a point-of-view closer to that of the US, Europe, and Ukraine was treated by my hosts as conspiracy.

Before meeting with Szilvia, my translator and I say down for lunch, and she shared her full thoughts on ethnic tensions in Transcarpathia for the first time. It was obviously very difficult for her to speak about this issue, she seemed to have to force her comments out, her brain doing its best to keep them in. “The Hungarian community is disappearing,” she said, speaking slowly and quietly. “Young people are leaving, even before the war, for work or for a better life. There are the heroic ones who stay behind, but that is not very many.” I asked about the education laws specifically and she said that while they may speed up the inevitable disappearance of Hungarian culture in the region, they didn’t cause it on their own. The exodus had already begun. She didn’t see anything unnatural occurring though, “this is just the reality,” she said. Even in her own family, with her traditional parents, she didn’t think any of her siblings would want to live in Transcarpathia as adults. “My family has lived in our house for four generations, and I think that will end with us.” She had no intention of being one of the “heroic” ones who stay behind.

We sat down with Szilvia in a chic café in the center of town. She began by saying she was surprised by both the approach of the Hungarian media, and the attitude of some Hungarians in Transcarpathia. “They are being too cautious. Russia was the aggressor, and the Hungarians are not standing up against them enough.”

I asked her point blank: in general, are the Hungarian minority being oppressed in your view? “No, she said, I don’t think rights are being impeded so much.” My translator translated this in a halting manner, it was clear this was one of the things she had to force out, it was hard for her to say even in translation. When I asked why she thought that, she just highlighted that no one treats you differently if you are Hungarian, she has never experienced any conflict.

I asked about the education issue, and she said it’s a good thing for Hungarians to learn Ukrainian as it will help them have a good life in this country. She argued that Transcarpathia is a diverse place and it’s important to know more than one language.

This attitude is not common in the Hungarians I have spoken with, I told her. She shrugged in response, “there are multiple views,” she said. “There are many people who think like me, but there is also another group which usually watches Hungarian media and thinks the US is to blame for the war.” They are the ones who usually see the war as not their problem, she told me. I asked, are these people victims of Russian propaganda? She shrugged, “some people just truly believe that.” I walked away from the conversation feeling comforted that the Hungarian community of Transcarpathia was not a monolith.

As my translator and I headed back to her childhood home, she led me down a sideroad to show me an apartment building she liked. The building had two women leaning out of a window on the second story while their kids played in the street outside. We stood outside the building looking up for a second when one of the women in the window yelled down at us in Ukrainian. My translator responded in her halting Ukrainian. As we walked away, I asked what the woman wanted, and my translator said she was offering to answer any questions we had. “I bet she would have let us up in the apartment to speak with her,” my translator said, “I really wish I spoke better Ukrainian.”

My translator grew up in Transcarpathia before the educational reforms kicked in. With that one sentence, she highlighted the entire point of the education laws: to allow for a shared tongue between citizens. She cannot really communicate with many of the people she grew up right next to. Hungarian is not banned in schools, but Ukrainian is mandated. You can keep your cultural language, while gaining the ability to communicate with your neighbors and understand official proceedings in the country you live in. This moment allowed me to fully understand Szilvia’s perspective. The educational laws could benefit Hungarian populations that are surrounded by Ukrainian speakers.

Even my translator’s mother, a conservative leader in the Hungarian community, was not as critical of the education laws as I expected. We sat in the living room of the house, under the large Hungarian flag, having a glass of wine when she said “The problem is that they do not teach Ukrainian as a second language. They start teaching it like it’s the children’s mother tongue.” Children don’t have the opportunity to learn the language well, she argued, telling me a story of how one of her daughters was being asked to translate sentences before she fully knew the Cyrillic alphabet. She told me about a Ukrainian textbook in Hungarian that a Hungarian cultural foundation had put together which was never successfully implemented into schools.

“If they were allowed to learn Ukrainian as a second language parents would support. We want our children to learn Ukrainian. I took my daughters to private Ukrainian lessons before they were taught in school.” This is an attitude that runs contrary to the Hungarian government’s description of the situation. She was frustrated with the schools, the curriculum, and teachers, but not with the idea Ukrainian being used in the classroom. She described an implementation issue, a local administrative problem, and one that can be resolved.

She did consider the Hungarian community to to be oppressed, however. I asked her point blank if Hungarian’s were facing oppression in Transcarpathia, the same question I posed to Szilvia. “Yes absolutely,” she replied without a shadow of a doubt. “You cannot have Hungarian celebrations without providing Ukrainian translation. Church is the only exception. All entry exams for universities are in Ukrainian now.”

I asked her how she felt about being used as a bargaining chip by the Hungarian government, how they cite her oppression as a reason to not meet with Ukrainian government. “I have ambivalent feelings about it,” she told me. “At first they were trying to protect us and blocking NATO meetings was the only weapon they had.” She paused for a moment, taking a sip of wine before continuing. “But, I think, they have done more damage than good.” I asked, what do you mean by damage? “They have made it harder for us with the Ukrainians. Many Ukrainian friends have asked me if I think that Orbán will invade Transcarpathia. Ukrainians think Hungary is an enemy, and that affects us too. It’s bad for ethnic tensions.”

She did highlight one action of the Hungarian government that she was very thankful for, not allowing the transportation of weapons through Hungary. “That protected us. I think if weapons were being transported through Transcarpathia we would have been bombed too. We are one of the only regions that hasn’t been bombed, and I think that’s thanks to Hungarian government decision.” I had not thought of the logistics of moving weapons through Hungary, it would make Transcarpathia a region with significance in the war, whereas it is currently an afterthought.

The next day I met with the mayor of Berehove / Beregszáz. We had arranged for a taxi to take us to city hall. Our taxi driver was a Hungarian man. He showed me pictures of his son serving in the military as he drove.

The city hall was a tense atmosphere. A security guard stood in the front vestibule and asked us what we were doing there before we could even enter the front door. I had arranged the meeting by directly texting with the mayor but was asked to wait at the entry. Then a press secretary came down and asked for a second time what I was doing there before leading me up the stairs. A secretary checked my passport and told the press secretary that I am American. A voice from another room said, “Americans are good people.” Then a middle-aged man arrived, asking me similar questions. He inspected my passport and asked to make a photocopy of it. Upon closer inspection of my passport, he realized I had a Hungarian name and was born in Hungary, which obviously made him suspicious. He asked me what my connection to Hungary was, how long I had lived there after being born, how old I was when I moved to the United States, if I had Hungarian citizenship, what I was doing back in Europe, and more, taking notes the whole time. Then he started asking me to lay out every question I planned to ask the mayor, but the mayor himself entered and gestured for me to join him in his office.

The office was large, a desk and a separate table for meeting. On a shelf on the far side there was a silver plate displaying the face of Hungarian poet Petőfi Sándor. There were also four flags on display, the city flag, Ukrainian flag, Hungarian flag, and European Union flag. The mayor himself was a stern and straight-faced man, I never saw him smile. Bilingual, he spoke Hungarian and Ukrainian. We conducted the interview in Hungarian with the help of my translator. He was dressed formally in a suit, sweater, and tie combination. I noticed a Gucci watch poking out from under his shirt cuffs.

I asked my first question, a general open-ended one designed to get him speaking generally, “what can you tell me about the experiences of the Hungarian population of Transcarpathia?” He responded, “First of all, I am a local governor in a country that is at war. Any political activity should be frozen if it is not in protection of the country. That is the primary concern at this time.”

My taxi driver after the meeting, when he found out I had interviewed the mayor, said, “I bet he will offer you nothing and say, ‘grab it how you like.’” By this he meant, the mayor is a politician, his answers would be non-committal and I would have to extrapolate meaning. This was a correct assumption, the mayor offered almost no specific answers. I asked about the oppression of minorities, and he said “There are Hungarians as well as Ukrainians here who perceive that they are oppressed but that is not how I see it. It is my job to maintain harmony in the region.” I asked, how do you prevent oppression and maintain harmony? He avoided examples, “Whenever there is oppression, it is my job to make it better. I prioritize organization over politics.”

When I asked about the Hungarian government position towards the war, he simply said “every country is helping Ukraine as they can. The humanitarian aid that Hungary provides is helpful because it is needed.” He dodged answering my questions about the use of the Hungarian minority as an excuse for not meeting with Ukrainian officials, he just said “Hungarian and Ukrainian governments need to meet at the table more often to discuss things.” He told me about how Orbán was recently invited to visit Kyiv. I informed him that the Hungarian government said that Orbán wouldn’t go because of the alleged oppression of the Hungarian minority. To this, the mayor simply reiterated that the two governments need to meet to discuss these concerns.

The mayor, while putting on a masterclass in media training, demonstrated the impasse that Hungarian Ukrainian relations is facing. Firstly, he said the war is his only political priority, indirectly saying that any complaints of the Hungarian minority are not pressing right now. That means the Hungarian government’s concerns of minority rights will not be met until the war is over. As they are demanding for the alleged oppression to be stopped before they meet with Kyiv about the war, they likely will not be meeting. It’s a diplomatic stalemate.

The alleged oppression of the Hungarian minority is not something that everyone believes to be true. Even within the Hungarian population, not everyone considers there to be outright oppression. From what I heard, learned, and observed, the specific concerns of the Hungarian community are local in scale, like being forced to provide Ukrainian translations at Hungarian events. Many of history’s famous conflicts were started by smaller issues that were blown out of proportion, so the two governments must work through this stalemate. Kyiv has invited Orbán to meet at the table, it seems the onus is on the Hungarians.