Someone could try to talk to the Ukrainian leadership, because they clearly don't understand. Written by Mátyás Kohán.
In March 2014, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel told US President Barack Obama about her first meeting with the Russian president, who invaded Crimea, that Vladimir Putin lived in "another world" . My Russian teacher in Vienna, Irina, said the same thing in May 2022. "U Putina v golove svoja kartyina mira", Putin has his own world view in his head. One that we European mortals can hardly understand.
Now, reading the latest anti-Hungarian outburst in Ukraine, I wonder
does everyone from Vladivostok to Lemberg have this strange other world in their heads?
I can't find any other explanation. Because the words of Oleksandr Merezko, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Kyiv parliament, are not related to the reality I know: "I still don't understand why Ukraine, which fights hard for European values, is not a member of the community, while Hungary, which systematically undermines European values, is."
"Let's go into each other's eyes," said Zsolt Borkai with the ex-defeated Hungarian, when he was asked about his relationship with prostitutes - and by this he meant that his interlocutor should also show some honesty if he had to confess about easy-bloods here. Since Merezko's accusations against us are at least as embarrassing, I suggest: let's face each other! Someone should try to talk to the Ukrainian leadership anyway, because they clearly don't understand.
Why isn't "Ukraine, which fights hard for European values", a member of the EU, in contrast to Hungary, which "systematically undermines European values"? Simple. because
because "European values" go a bit further than the seamless alignment with American foreign policy ideas.
If one's Ukrainian son consumes European values exclusively and directly from the precious mouth of Guy Verhofstadt, then of course it may not be noticeable to him - but that still makes it so. EU membership entails cutting agriculture to EU size, gigantic reforms in public administration, the conversion of all kinds of data services, statistics and procedures to EU standards, the transformation of education and playgrounds, and the adoption of a pile of minority protection directives. Hungary and the whole of Central Europe accomplished these at the cost of blood and sweat over a period of years.
Therefore, no matter how many snakes and frogs the Budapest and Brussels politicians shout, spew and throw at each other, no matter what foreign policy firecrackers fly between other European capitals and ours, we have become an EU country through and through in our operation, an integral part of the community. Ukraine is light years away from all that. The condition for joining the EU is not that a country, regardless of the topic, repeats the sentences of the ruling Brussels leadership in a mirror translation, despite Ukraine's belief that this is the case. If it were so, Kosovo, Georgia and Moldova would have been members of the union long ago. But they are not.
Do not confuse the parrot with the EU member state, these are separate professions, Mr. Merezko.
Node "Ukraine is bleeding and paying a high price to protect Europe, including Hungary," says Mr. Merezko. However, no one in Budapest ever believed this hoax for a minute, and even in the smoky rooms of Brussels, the number of people who are still relishing the Ukrainian honey string is dwindling. No, undoubtedly the bleeding Ukraine paid a heavy price
it does not protect Europe and within it Hungary, but the bitter fruit of the past ten years of indefensible rampage by the Western Ukrainian nation-builders.
If the territorial integrity of Ukraine is not restored, i.e. the outcome considered only possible by the Zelenskiys is not realized, the leadership in Kyiv will crumble under the weight of the questions that arise.
However, the territorial integrity of Ukraine will not be restored - this is not said by me, but by Valery Zaluzhny , the chief of staff of the Ukrainian army. He writes, and I quote: "The fact that the war becomes a standing war leads to its prolongation and poses significant risks for both the armed forces of Ukraine and the entire state. In addition, it is beneficial to the enemy, which is trying to recreate and increase its military strength in every conceivable way" .
In Hungarian: Ukraine will lose if everything continues like this. And the questions are already haunting me.
After all, who and what was it that finally occurred to him that there might be a more beneficial form of existence for Ukraine than the status quo ante before 2014? (Ukraine retained its entire internationally recognized territory and received extremely cheap Russian gas; in return, the port of Sevastopol was a Russian naval base, the country was neutral between economic and military blocs, and the nationalities, from Russian to Tatar to Hungarian, lived peacefully side by side with their languages.) What idiot saw it as a good idea to carve a western nation-state out of a multilingual, multi-ethnic, neutral country? Which illiterate didn't count on the fact that Russia wouldn't abandon its single base in the Warm Sea, taking the beautiful principle of the sovereignty of nations to heart? Which imbecile has not compared the economic and political development of Belarus or Kazakhstan with that of Ukraine? And who hasn't thought it through,
that the countries in a situation similar to Ukraine's may not go where Ukraine is going because there is no way?
Or why it was a good idea to respond to Russian aggression in 2014 with an open attempt to assimilate nationalities? And if all these questions were not serious enough by themselves, there is one question above all: why should millions of Ukrainians who could have lived in peace in a pre-2014 Ukraine die or flee for a castle in the air, and perhaps would not have even known whose ships were at anchor At Sevastopol? And those who stayed there, why do they have to live further away from Europe today in terms of financial, security and rule of law than they did ten years ago?
The big, heavy truth, Pane Merezko, is that Europe's problem with Russia is not Europe's en bloc.
Europe was let go by Russia to our great fortune; The reaction to Finland's NATO accession in the middle of a war was no more than a feeble grunt, and the entry of the Baltics and Central Europe did not deserve even that much. Only Ukraine has a problem with Russia. And he - in addition to Putin's not an indefensible move - has a problem with Russia in no small part because he made it for himself. Because he pursued a Russia policy that could only have been carried out alongside a much weaker Russia, or far away from Russia. They did not deserve what they have been getting since February 2022, because no one can earn it with anything, no one can excuse them in any way. But they have an eternal responsibility in it.
And finally, let's get back to the subject, the start of Ukraine's EU accession negotiations, which Hungary - nota bene: contrary to its candidate status - is not expected to support. Pane Merezko, this touches on the most gut-wrenching, self-revealing and filthiest part of Ukrainian politics in the last ten years. The fact that they want to erase their nationalities from the face of the earth and sprinkle them like small buckwheat balls into a big blue-yellow porridge,
that in the meantime they would even enter into an alliance with those whose blood from abroad is rammed into the concrete at home.
This is what cannot be done with us. They don't have, never had, and never will have a solid explanation as to why it was necessary to revoke the linguistic rights of Transcarpathian Hungarians due to the Russian annexation of Crimea; as well as why, in the middle of the war, they are so determined to eliminate the last remaining islands of Hungarian-language education. For almost ten years, every existing Hungarian leader has been trying to talk to the Ukrainians about this, we sent the most professional ambassador who understands you best to Kiev, we brought up the matter in every existing forum,
And Ukraine does three things: it talks on the side, tightens and does not answer the phone.
When Mr. Merezko talks about "Hungary behaving in a very shameless way" and while Ukraine is bleeding, "Orbán is trying to get something for himself" during the decision to join, he knows exactly that he is lying. There is nothing mysterious about Hungary's conditionality, it has remained the same for ten years in relation to NATO and the EU: return to the Transcarpathian Hungarians the world before 2014, to which Ukraine, in words, also yearns to return. Viktor Orbán has been trying to "squeeze something out" for the Transcarpathian Hungarians for ten years now, and giving this something to Ukraine would cost exactly nothing.
I am slowly saying that it is also understood in Kiev: minority rights.
If the EU is not worth even a microscopic effort to protect minorities, it is in the right place.
Featured image: Reuters
