Hungary will block and veto every step Ukraine takes towards the European Union, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in a message published on the Hungarian Foreign Ministry website on Sept. 26, the day Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed his country’s new education bill.
Hungary has objected to the new “language norm” of the education bill, which obliges all schools in Ukraine, including national minority ones, to make Ukrainian the main educational language of their school programs.
“We guarantee that Ukraine will be hurt in the future,” Szijjártó said. “It is a shame and disgrace that the president of Ukraine has signed the law on education. According to the law, national minorities students from the 5th grade and upwards will have to study all subjects, apart from their mother language, in Ukrainian.”
Szijjártó said Poroshenko could forget about Ukraine’s further European integration, as Hungary will block all initiatives that would be beneficial to Ukraine in all international organizations, especially in the European Union.
However, Ukrainian Education Minister Lilia Hrynevych described the Hungarian minister’s statement as “political speculation” in an interview with Ukraine’s Pryamiy TV channel on Sept.26.
“We have been cooperating with all diplomats and ambassadors, including the Hungarian ambassador. And Hungary’s position is indeed odd,” Hrynevych said.
“While the other ambassadors listened to our point of view, the Hungarian ambassador responded that we were going to close national minority schools. I said that’s not true. But two days later, the Hungarian parliament officially claims that ‘Ukraine is closing the schools of national minorities.”
The parliament adopted the new education bill on Sept. 5. In July, Hrynevych told journalists that the new language norm in the education bill would indeed limit teaching in national minorities’ languages in Ukraine, but that this would not limit the constitutional rights of national minorities.
There were 71 Hungarian, and 75 Romanian and Moldovan schools in Ukraine as of 2017. According to the Slovo i Dilo news website, more than 16,000 students study school subjects in Hungarian, 356,000 – in Russian, 16,000 – in Romanian, 3,000 – in Moldovan, 2,000 – in Polish, and 3.4 million – in Ukrainian.
It was decided to adopt the Ukrainian instruction norm because students in national minority schools have been studying all subjects in their mother languages, with only a couple of hours a week of Ukrainian language lessons, Hrynevych said.
“As a result, for example, (some) Hungarian school graduates in Ukraine just don’t know and don’t speak Ukrainian at all. That must be changed,” the Ukrainian minister said in July.
On Sept. 26, Hrynevych said the Hungarian government was being intransigent.
“Hungarian officials are not interested in getting an explanation – they have their own position,” she said. “I don’t know, whether it’s connected to the upcoming election or some other reason. But this is not a fight for the interests of ethnic Hungarians living in Ukraine.”
She called Szijjártó’s threats dangerous, and damaging to bilateral relations.
Hrynevych also said it was disturbing that many people from national minorities, living in Ukraine, did not speak the national language. Linguistic isolation could cause the whole minority community to become isolated within the country, she said.
Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority mostly lives in Zakarpattya Oblast in western Ukraine. As the Kyiv Post reported in 2016, in Berehove, in Zakarpattya Oblast, over 50 percent of the population identifies as ethnic Hungarian.
Out of a population of more than 1 million people in Zakarpattya Oblast, more than 150,000 belong to Ukraine’s Hungarian-speaking minority, living mostly in the oblast’s Mukacheve, Tyachiv, Hust, Vynogradiv, Berehivsky and Uzhhorod districts.
Berehivsky district has the highest concentration of ethnic Hungarians – 80 percent of the population.
