Ukrainian, Hungarian officials meet for talks
KAMIANYTSIA, Ukraine — A yearslong diplomatic conflict between Ukraine and Hungary took a step toward resolution on Monday during a meeting of their foreign ministers, but no breakthrough was reached on Hungary’s blocking of a crucial European Union financial aid package for Kyiv.
The meeting, at a resort near the Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod, came as European leaders are scrambling to persuade Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to lift his veto of $54 billion in EU aid to Ukraine, which he announced at an EU summit in December.
Orbán, widely perceived as the Kremlin’s closest EU ally, has said he will not support financing the aid through the 27-member bloc’s budget, frustrating other EU leaders who are struggling to force a change in his position before a summit in Brussels on Thursday when they will try again to approve the funding.
Monday’s meeting was Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto’s first visit to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, and the only official bilateral meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, in the last two years.
Szijjarto said that modifications Ukraine made late last year to its education and language laws had “doubtlessly stopped a negative spiral” that had restricted the rights of ethnic Hungarians in the western Ukrainian region of Zakarpattia to study in their native language.
But, he said, those changes were not enough to resolve the dispute over the language rights of the Hungarian minority that has dominated the two countries’ poor relations for years.
Hungary, Szijjarto said, has an “expectation that the members of the Hungarian national community will regain their rights that already existed in 2015.”
“We still have a long way to go,” he said, “but we on the Hungarian side are ready to do this work.”
Kuleba said that he considered the question of the Hungarian minority “fundamentally resolved,” but that a joint committee will be established to examine how Kyiv can address Budapest’s further demands concerning Ukraine’s Hungarian community, and present those findings to the respective governments in 10 days.
None of the officials would comment on whether Hungary was likely to lift its veto of the EU aid package at Thursday’s summit.
U.N. CASES
The United Nations’ top court will rule on Friday whether it has jurisdiction in a case brought by Ukraine accusing Russia of violating international law by using a false accusation of genocide as the pretext for its 2022 invasion.
Kyiv launched the case at the International Court of Justice days after the start of the full-scale war in 2022, arguing that Russia breached the 1948 Genocide Convention by wrongly claiming Ukraine was committing genocide against Russian-speaking people in the country.
Russia has flouted an order by The Hague-based court to halt hostilities.
Moscow snubbed hearings over provisional measures in 2022 but filed an objection to the court’s jurisdiction. During hearings in 2023, lawyers for Russia asked the court to toss out the complaint, calling the legal case an “abuse of process.”
Ukraine is not claiming Russia is committing genocide but rather arguing that the false accusation of genocide is enough to violate the 1948 treaty. Kyiv told judges the neighboring countries clearly have a dispute as defined by the convention.
The court on Wednesday will rule on a separate case between Russia and Ukraine. In a complaint filed in 2017, Kyiv says Russia began bankrolling rebels in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and has discriminated against Crimea’s multiethnic community after its annexation of the region.
In that case, brought under an anti-discrimination treaty and a terrorism financing convention, Ukraine has asked the court to order Moscow to pay reparations for attacks and crimes in the region. That would include the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down by Russia-backed rebels on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew.
Latest U.N. figures say 10 million people have been displaced by the war in Ukraine, with more than 10,000 people killed and another 19,000 injured.