Ukraine’s Worries Go Beyond Just Russia
BEREHOVE, Ukraine — When the Hungarian State Opera visited a town just over the border last month to perform a patriotic opera, 3,000 people rose to their feet for the playing of the Ukrainian and Hungarian national anthems. The audience in Berehove stood mute during the Ukrainian hymn, then burst into boisterous song for the anthem of Hungary, a foreign country.
Whether along its frontier with Russia in the east or the European Union in the west, border-straddling bonds of language and culture make it difficult for Ukraine to hang together as a unified state. And Hungary’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orban, has exploited nationalist impulses while driving a populist surge across much of Europe, causing concern that he will ignite the grievances of ethnic groups caught outside their homelands.
The town of Berehove is made up largely of ethnic Hungarians who mostly speak Hungarian, not Ukrainian, and set their watches to the time in Hungary, not Ukraine.
Few nations have had their lands redistributed as mush as those in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly former components of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which disintegrated after World War I. Berehove has found itself in five countries in the past century.
Under the Trianon Treaty in 1920, Hungary lost two-thirds of its land. Fury at the dismemberment of the country has been constant ever since, but has taken on new force under Mr. Orban. His government has given one million ethnic Hungarians living elsewhere passports and the right to vote, creating a large bloc who mostly cheer the nationalism championed by Mr. Orban and his party, Fidesz. Hungary itself has only 9.7 million people.
Berehove’s ethnic Hungarian mayor, Zoltan Babek, said nobody is agitating for his town to rejoin Hungary. But asked whether he considered himself a Ukrainian patriot, he said: “I am a patriot of this town.”
Prosecutors in Transcarpathia, the region bordering Hungary, recently announced an investigation for high treason over the issuing of Hungarian passports to Ukrainian citizens. The Foreign Ministry in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, ordered the expulsion of Hungary’s consul in Berehove following the posting of a video that showed residents pledging loyalty to Hungary at a passport ceremony. A Hungarian diplomat can be heard warning them not to tell the Ukrainian authorities about their new citizenship. Ukrainian law bars dual citizenshipw.
Mr. Orban’s government insists it has no intention of trying to seize lost lands and rebuild “Greater Hungary,” which includes territory now in Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine. But while opposed to multiculturalism at home, it has complained about attempts by other countries to force their Hungarian minorities to learn their languages and customs.
In July, Mr. Orban’s government announced the appointment of a ministerial commissioner for the development of Transcarpathia, which is not in Hungary. Dmytro Tuzhanskyi, an expert on Hungary’s relations with Ukraine in Uzhgorod, the capital of Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region, said: “It was a mistake, a Freudian mistake. It showed what they are really thinking.”
Ukraine has been left feeling besieged. Hungary is a member of the European Union, which has put moving Ukraine toward the West at the heart of its joint foreign policy. But Mr. Orban has repeatedly pushed in the other direction, tilting toward Russia.
Budapest provides support to the Hungarian diaspora. The biggest beneficiary in Berehove is the Ferenc Rakoczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian Institute. The institute’s rector, Idiko Orosz, is grateful for help in protesting restrictions on the use of languages other than Ukrainian. Hungarian-speakers in Ukraine, she said, are not like the foreign immigrants whom Mr. Orban rails against in Hungary, but are more like Native Americans who suddenly found their homeland taken over by strangers.
“We stayed at home; they came to us, not us to them,” she said, noting that her grandmother was born in Czechoslovakia, her mother in Hungary and she in the Soviet Union. “None of us moved anywhere.”