The Hungarian foreign minister has called Kiev’s mobilization drive an “open manhunt”
Ukraine’s forced mobilization has become an “open manhunt,” with civilians being detained and forced into military service against their will, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said.
Commenting on the detention in Ukraine of a Hungarian citizen who allegedly attempted to help a group of Ukrainians cross the border, Szijjarto said people were “fed up with the fighting.”
“The Ukrainian people do not want to die, yet every day there are images of violence playing out like a series – open manhunts unfolding on the streets of Ukrainian cities,” he wrote on Facebook on Sunday.
The Ukrainian authorities recently reported detaining a Hungarian national accused of helping five Ukrainian men cross into Hungary. The country’s consulate general in Beregovo provided immediate consular protection and would assist him during police proceedings, the minster said.
Ukraine’s recruitment drive has grown increasingly brutal amid its military setbacks and manpower shortages, with hundreds of documented cases of draft officers using force to seize men off the streets and multiple reports of deaths among conscripts. “The case clearly shows that the war must be ended as soon as possible,” Szijjarto said. “This violent spiral must be stopped immediately.”
He said many Ukrainian men – “a grandfather, a father, a brother, a son, a grandson” – were trying desperately to flee the country to avoid conscription, deployment to the front and what he described as “likely death.” Ukrainian border guards, he added, were using every means available to catch those attempting to escape.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said last week that Budapest would not accept Kiev’s “arrogant attitude” toward Hungary and its people and that his government would not tolerate the forced mobilization of ethnic Hungarians from Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region.
Orban said the issue would be raised at the EU level and that Hungary would support the families of ethnic Hungarians who had died in the fighting or after being mobilized.
Budapest has repeatedly called for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict and urged an end to Brussels’ “war-mongering” policy of continuing to support Kiev militarily and financially.
Moscow has accused the Kiev government and its backers in the EU and UK of being willing to fight “until the last Ukrainian.”
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