Hungary summoned the Ukrainian ambassador in that country on Thursday after Prime Minister Viktor Orban revealed the alleged killing of a Hungarian citizen in Ukraine for refusing military service.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban made a statement in support of claims published in the Hungarian national media on Thursday that an ethnic Hungarian with a Hungarian passport who lived in Ukraine was “kidnapped” by military recruiters and beaten with iron bars for resisting conscription.
National broadsheet Magyar Nemzet summarised the alleged chain of events which it said saw József Sebestyén from Beregszás – in what is known in Hungarian as the Transcarpathia region, but legally called the Zakarpattia Oblast by the Ukrainian government – die of his injuries. Per the paper’s account, Ukrainian military recruiters seized Sebestyén outside a cafe in his town and forced him into a van for transport to a military centre.
The report claimed the recruiters beat him with metal rods for refusing military service, resulting in his death three weeks later. He was reportedly buried in his home town on Wednesday. The paper printed the allegation that Sebestyén “received a truly brutal beating with an iron club, which may have contributed to his later death.” It also claimed the recruiters humiliated him by forcing him to crawl in mud and that his family were told he was in good health until being notified abruptly that he died.
While Budapest claims Sebestyén was a Hungarian citizen, given he was a native of Transcarpathia, he was very likely a citizen of Ukraine as well, or at least had attempted to renounce his Ukrainian citizenship. Neither government has clarified if Sebestyén possessed Ukrainian citizenship.
The Ukrainian government has not at press time addressed the claims. Last year, the Ukrainian government acknowledged 30 people had died trying to avoid the draft, but said they had been killed in accidents trying to flee, rather than by direct government action.
Among the causes of death listed were drowning by trying to cross Ukraine’s border rivers to make it abroad, freezing to death in the mountains, and being attacked by wild animals.
A spokesman for the Hungarian government confirmed on Thursday that Budapest had summoned the Ukrainian ambassador, affirming: “This cannot happen in Europe. Officials of a country that wants to join the European Union cannot beat people to death with iron rods just because they don’t want to go to war.”
The summoning of the Ukrainian ambassador by Hungary — a traditional form of diplomatic protest, and a signal to the world that a nation is expressing extreme displeasure at the other — is the latest such instance of souring relations between the two European nations. The Ukrainian-Hungarian bond was never a strong one: the presence of Transcarpathia, the home of an ethnically Hungarian and Hungarian-speaking minority inside Ukraine that ended up under the control of Kyiv due to the treaty of Trianon in 1920 – has long been a sore spot.
Of particular concern to Budapest are long-standing allegations about Ukrainian mistreatment of its Hungarian-speaking minority. The European Union has cited Ukraine’s treatment of minorities as a reason why the country is not yet ready to join the bloc and Hungary has recently said it will veto Ukraine joining.
Ukraine recently summoned the Hungarian ambassador to protest its EU veto and has accused Hungary of “illegally” distributing passports in Transcarpathia, of operating a spy network inside Ukraine, and of spying on Ukrainian air defence.
Kyiv has hinted that Budapest is anti-war not for love of peace, but out of secret support for Vladimir Putin. In 2022, Ukraine accused Hungary of having cut a secret deal with the Kremlin that would see Budapest able to take back Transcarpathia from Ukraine once Russia had captured the whole country. The allegations were treated with outrage by NATO-member Hungary, the government calling the claims “groundless and also insane”.
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