BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary and Ukraine will begin high-level consultations on the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority, the countries’ foreign ministers said on Monday, an early sign that strained relations between Budapest and Kyiv could improve under Hungary’s new government. Bilateral ties between the neighboring countries had eroded for years under the pro-Russian government of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which refused to provide Ukraine with money or weapons to assist in its defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion. Orbán, who was voted out of office in a landslide election in April, justified many of his government’s anti-Ukraine policies with what he said was the restriction of language and education rights for the roughly 100,000 ethnic Hungarians that live in the Ukrainian region of Zakarpattia.
Aimed at combating Russian influence but ultimately affecting other minority languages, Ukraine passed a law in 2017 that made Ukrainian the required language of study past the fifth grade, angering Romanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian minorities.But in a post on X Monday, Hungary’s new Foreign Minister Anita Orbán wrote that “expert-level consultations aimed at resolving the rights of the Hungarian minority” will begin as soon as this week.
