WARSAW, Poland — A grievance rooted in the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War has hampered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s quest for support against Russian aggression and fueled suspicions within Europe about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ambitions in a tumultuous moment.
Orban, who has developed an international reputation as a conservative populist who favors strong economic ties to Russia and China, has clashed with Ukrainian officials in recent years in response to Kyiv’s adoption of a language law that Budapest has denounced as discriminating against ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine — one of the many Hungarian communities that found themselves living under new governments a century ago when a post-war settlement shrank the Hungarian state.
“The Hungarians have always resented [that at the end of the war] they lost two-thirds of their country,” former special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, an American diplomat whose career included a stop in Hungary, told the Washington Examiner. “Several million Hungarians were, all of the sudden, no longer living in Hungary — they were living in other countries. So that’s just a point of reference for Hungarian mindsets. They have, for the most part, reconciled themselves to the fact that — that’s life.”
Still, Hungarian governments long have supported Hungarian communities abroad, and the Hungarians in Ukraine have enjoyed “extensive freedoms, including a de facto autonomous education system with Hungarian as the language of instruction,” according to analysts at the Center for Eastern Studies in Poland. A controversy flared around a Ukrainian education law designed to force students to learn the Ukrainian language, exacerbated by Orban’s decision to grant voting rights to Hungarians abroad and his support for Hungarian political parties in a border region of Ukraine known as Transcarpathia.
“The result of the vote clearly shows that Transcarpathian Hungarians are proud of their thousand year old roots and by taking their future in their hands want to thrive as Hungarians in their homeland,” Orban wrote in a 2020 letter to an ethnic Hungarian political party in Ukraine.
Orban’s overtures have created an international voting bloc for his political party, angered Ukrainian officials who regard his policies as a violation of a law that “prohibits foreigners from taking part in the election campaign,” and drawn comparisons to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ominous declaration that Moscow would “defend the rights of Russians” around Europe
“Hungary is doing the same thing,” a senior European official who has worked in Ukraine told the Washington Examiner. “Hungary hasn’t [gotten] over its Austro-Hungarian Empire, actually — very similar to [the] Russian empire. All the states which have had empires, in their background, behave quite differently” than states that never had an empire.
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That perception of Orban has taken root in some quarters of the U.S. government, laid bare in the course of testimony from a senior State Department official during the congressional investigation that culminated with former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment. George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary in the European and Eurasian Bureau, told lawmakers that Orban had an “animus” for Ukraine rooted in the Hungarian distaste for the 1920 treaty that dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War.
“There are about 130,000 ethnic Hungarians who live in the trans-Carpathian province of Ukraine,” Kent observed in 2019. “And ahead of next year, which is the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon, post-World War I, which resulted in more ethnic Hungarians living outside Hungary than inside, this issue of greater Hungary is at the top of Orban’s agenda.”
Orban wants Ukraine to give ethnic Hungarians “dual citizenship, community rights and autonomy,” a series of demands that echoed some of Putin’s priorities as the Kremlin used the 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine as leverage to demand a major revision of the Ukrainian Constitution.
“They wanted to get special protections for the Hungarian minority reinstated, but the Ukrainians are not thinking about Hungary at all when they’re passing these laws,” Volker said. “They’re thinking about the Russian minority and wanting to make sure that they are reinforcing the Ukrainian national identity overall. So, they’re just unwilling to really accommodate these Hungarian complaints.”
Orban responded by using his prerogatives as the leader of a member of NATO and the European Union, two organizations that require unanimity in their decision-making, to impede Ukraine’s interactions with either bloc, even as Western officials responded to the initial Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine by scrambling to upgrade Ukrainian military capabilities.
“He has picked this particular issue and, for instance, blocked all meetings in NATO with Ukraine at the ministerial level or above because of this particular issue,” Kent testified in 2019. “So his animus towards Ukraine is well known, documented, and has lasted now two years.”
Orban relented somewhat in the days after Putin launched a full-scale offensive to overthrow Zelensky. Hungary dropped its opposition to Ukraine’s membership in the Estonia-based NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in March and agreed to stiff economic sanctions on Russia, but Hungarian officials still oppose the imposition of a total energy embargo, and they have refused to participate in any operations to deliver military equipment to Ukraine.
“The reason for making this decision is that such deliveries might become targets of hostile military action,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in February. “We have to ensure the security of Hungary … that we are not getting involved in that war.”
Szijjarto has argued that their refusal even to allow deliveries through Hungarian territory was vindicated by a Russian strike in western Ukraine, near the Polish border.
“If we had not banned the transit of arms shipments through Hungary, they would have been handed over at the Hungarian-Ukrainian border, which would have posed a threat of an attack similar to yesterday in Transcarpathia, near the Hungarian-Ukrainian border,” Szijjarto wrote in a March 14 post on Facebook.
That posture provoked a personal challenge from Zelensky, who reminded Orban of the carnage inflicted on cities such as Mariupol, a once-bustling port city on the Black Sea turned into “a hell” by Russian bombardments. “Hungary … I want to stop here and be honest. Once and for all. You have to decide for yourself who you are with,” Zelensky told Orban.
Zelensky urged him to visit a famous Hungarian Holocaust memorial known as the Shoes on the Danube Bank. “Look at those shoes. And you will see how mass killings can happen again in today’s world. And that’s what Russia is doing today,” he continued. “And you hesitate whether to impose sanctions or not? And you hesitate whether to let weapons through or not? And you hesitate whether to trade with Russia or not?”
Zelensky ended on an encouraging note. “We believe in you. We need your support. We believe in your people,” he said — but another senior Ukrainian official has voiced a darker view of Orban’s attitude.
“The way the official Hungarian leadership is treating Ukraine lately is worse than even that of some of the Russian satellite states from the former Soviet Union,” Ukrainian deputy prime minister Irina Vereshchuk wrote on Facebook. “Why? Is that because they want Russian gas with a discount? Or maybe that is because they silently dream of our Transcarpathia? What about the people of Hungary? Do they want to be the ones who are trying to stab us in the back while we are in [this] plight?”
A former executive of a Hungarian state media outlet aligned with Orban gave oxygen to that idea in his own Facebook post.
“We must be emotionally and financially ready to accept the Hungarian people and / or the Hungarian territory,” former state news agency MTI chief executive Csaba Belenessy suggested last week. “Hungary must not take a single step in order for Transcarpathia to return home, but we must be emotionally ready to accept the Hungarians and Ruthenians there, and if the hectic situation of great power develops, then Transcarpathia itself will be peaceful.”
Hungarian officials dismissed Vereshchuk’s statement as “senseless accusations and baseless slander.” A second senior European official from another country agreed that those suspicions are implausible given Hungarian support for sanctions on Russia but acknowledged that Orban has an incentive to play up his solidarity with Transcarpathian Hungarians, even at the expense of Ukraine, given that his party is headed for an April 3 showdown with a united opposition bloc that hopes to oust Orban from the prime minister’s office.
“I would not believe that they would really think that, in this situation, they could get anything, actually, especially when Russia is attacking Ukraine,” the second senior European official said. “So definitely, Orban would set his bets on some sort of a nationalistic approach and some sort of closer relationship with Russia, trying to get discounts on oil and gas. That’s possible — but not more.”
The first senior European official surmised that one curious Russian decision, over the course of the military offensive, could play into Orban’s hands to position himself as a protector of the Hungarian diaspora.
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“That Transcarpathian-Uzhhorod area — this is the [one] area which has not been hit by missiles. All the other corners [of Ukraine] have been targeted, actually, but not that area,” the first senior European official said. “If there’s the possibility there’s no hit against areas where Hungarian minority [lives] before the elections, that definitely can show Orban as a great diplomat” in the eyes of Hungarian voters.
