Hungarian-Ukrainian governments’ conflict

This 2015 Euronews video says about itself:

Ukraine’s Hungarians wait impatiently for better times to come

The Carpathian mountain chain lies along Ukraine’s border with Hungary.The vibrant and well-established Hungarian community inside Ukraine has escaped, like the rest of western Ukraine, the ravages that have swept Donbass and the east. This is agricultural country, and despite being poorer than the rest of the country, life is gentler and prices are much much lower. The region gets financial aid from Budapest, and many towns and villages are twinned with Hungarian communities.

By Jason Melanovski:

Relations deteriorate between Hungary and Ukraine

9 October 2018

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has expelled a consul of the Hungarian government for what it calls the illegal distribution of Hungarian passports to Ukrainian citizens.

In hidden camera footage posted to YouTube in September, Hungarian consular staff in the town of Berehove are shown distributing Hungarian citizenship documents and leading oaths of loyalty to the Hungarian state.

Under Ukrainian law, citizens are not permitted to hold dual citizenship. However, in practice, as a multi-ethnic country with a large number of Ukrainians living and working abroad, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens hold passports from Russia, Belarus, Poland, Romania and elsewhere.

In retaliation for Ukraine’s expulsion of its government representative, Hungary announced that it would be kicking out a Ukrainian diplomat currently stationed in Budapest. It also threatened to block Ukraine’s bid for NATO and EU membership.

The escalating tit-for-tat expulsions are a result of deteriorating relations between the two right-wing, nationalist governments over the treatment of ethnic minorities, laws on language rights and geopolitics.

Over 200,000 Hungarians live in Ukraine, with the majority residing in the Zakarpattia province. Prior to World War II this region was not considered part of then-Soviet Ukraine.

Discrimination against the Hungarian language has been presented by the government of Viktor Orban as the main reason for its increasingly negative attitude towards Kiev. In September of 2017, the Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko introduced a new, undemocratic language law that limited the ability of ethnic minorities to be instructed in their native language. It made Ukrainian the required language of instruction for all students in secondary school.

While the bill was clearly intended to target the use of Russian language in schools and “Ukrainianize” the country’s Russian population, it also angered other ethnic minorities. In response to the changes in the language bill, EU members Hungary, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria all filed complaints with the Council of Europe and the OSCE. Hungary said that it will veto any vote in support of Ukrainian membership in the EU and NATO, unless the language bill is changed.

The enforced use of Ukrainian has been utilized by the Poroshenko regime and the country’s nationalist thugs to attack ethnic minorities and whip up ethnic hatred of all things “anti-Ukrainian”. This is part of the now over four-year-long war against the Russian-majority Donbass region of the country, which attempted to break away from Kiev in the wake of the anti-Russian coup that brought Poroshenko to power.

In September, the western city of Lviv banned all Russian-language books, movies and other cultural artefacts, despite the fact that a substantial minority of the population uses the Russian language in daily life.

Such actions have further emboldened right-wing thugs to attack those speaking languages other than Ukrainian in the public sphere. In September, a McDonald’s worker in Kiev was accosted by a right-wing “activist” for speaking Russian while serving customers. …

In addition to already announced plans to build a naval base on the Azov Sea, Ukraine’s Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) Oleksandr Turchynov declared last week that the country intends “to conduct serious drills in the waters of the Azov Sea.” For its part, Washington has supplied the Ukrainian navy with patrol boats.

Last month Ukraine conducted a series of provocative military exercises throughout the country with the support and involvement of the United States, which has military “advisers” all over the territory. Ukraine’s army sent troops towards the Hungarian border during the exercises, in an attempt to intimidate Budapest. Kiev denied that the exercises targeted Hungary, absurdly claiming that the show of force was meant to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine from the west.

While Trump is constantly lambasted by the Democratic Party for being insufficiently aggressive towards Russia, he has in fact gone further than former President Barack Obama in support for Kiev, including by sending the country Javelin anti-tank missiles.

In September, the US House of Representatives approved the 2019 draft military budget, which increases war funding for Ukraine to $250 million.