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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Ukraine and Hungary Agree on Way Out of Crisis: Budapest Ready to Unblock Two EU Accession Clusters
The severe crisis in relations between Ukraine and Hungary, which intensified in recent weeks and harmed both sides, appears to be coming to an end.
This is reported by European Pravda.
After public confrontation, Kyiv and Budapest quietly shifted to a constructive approach and agreed on a solution that is a win for all parties — Ukraine, the Hungarian government, the Hungarian minority in Zakarpattia, and the European Union.
There is also an action plan for resolving the crisis.
The first step, by agreement, was taken by Ukraine: a draft law agreed with minorities — including the Hungarian minority — has been submitted to parliament. There are votes for it. Even Volodymyr Viatrovych, cautious about rolling back legislation related to language issues, stated his willingness to vote for these amendments.
Adoption of the law will allow Madyar to demonstrate that he cares about the Hungarian minority in Ukraine. Orbán failed to obtain a similar outcome.
In return, Ukraine will receive no less a clear gain. Budapest will unblock two clusters in negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union. This will happen on 13 October. To meet that date, Kyiv, Brussels, and Budapest must adhere to a rather tight schedule — but it is entirely realistic.
All clusters, according to the plan, are to be opened by the end of the year, Vice Prime Minister Vsevolod Chenstov told EP.
This does not mean that all bilateral issues have been resolved.
It is noticeable that Ukraine and Hungary severely lack trust.
In particular, the exit plan was built to guarantee that neither side abandons the other. But information from European Pravda from both sides indicates: the agreement will be implemented.
And that also creates room for further settlement.
If the plan works, the losers will likely be only Russia and Orbán’s pro-Russian party. That said, this suggests the two may still try to derail the agreements between the Ukrainian and Hungarian governments. So much will depend on whether the Hungarian authorities do not fall for their provocations.
This article explains in detail what was agreed and what to expect.
"Carpathian hysteria" of Hungary’s prime minister
We have already recounted the peak of the conflict.
The inaugural summit of the "Carpathian Eight" in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, which Budapest initially agreed to attend (the only question was at what level it would be represented) — suddenly escalated into a loud diplomatic conflict, with slaps and gestures of contempt from the Hungarian side. European Pravda covered this in detail in the article "Hungarian punishment for Ukraine."
Prime Minister Péter Madyar personally contributed to destroying bridges toward reconciliation with Ukraine.
He publicly accused Kyiv of actions not coordinated with the Hungarian government (EP knows for sure that these accusations were untrue). He also tore up an agreement between Naftogaz and Hungarian MOL on building oil storage facilities for Ukraine. That last step was the most illogical, since it would have given Hungary money and Ukraine confidence in stable fuel supplies. But Madyar was outraged that the companies arranged it without his involvement.
Under normal circumstances, such actions would have led to a collapse in relations.
But relations between Ukraine and Hungary were already in deep crisis. There is always room to fall further, of course, but Kyiv was not interested in that. Therefore there were no symmetric reactions from the Ukrainian side.
And, as life proved, that was the right decision.
Why did Madyar do this? Some context is necessary.
The prime minister’s anti-Ukrainian statements were made in parliament and were a response to criticisms from Orbán’s party, whose deputies once again accused the government of becoming "too pro-Ukrainian." For some reason these baseless claims consistently unsettle Madyar — and he again tried to show that he treats Kyiv no better than Orbán does.
But it seems that after some time the Hungarian authorities realized they had gone too far.
Perhaps for part of the electorate actions "like Orbán" are justified. But certainly not for everyone. Moreover, this raises more and more questions in other capitals. Baseless blocking of Ukraine’s path to the EU, brazen actions on the foreign-policy stage, etc. — are certainly not what everyone expected from the new Hungarian government.
Therefore, just a few days after those statements that resembled a tantrum, Budapest began looking for ways to dialogue with Kyiv.
How the Ukrainian-Hungarian reconciliation began
Several European Pravda sources say the turning point was the UN General Assembly in New York.
Hungary was represented there by Anita Orbán, who met with her Ukrainian counterpart Andriy Sybiha — and the ministers agreed for some time not to make these talks public. Only now, as the implementation of the Kyiv–Budapest agreement has reached the final stretch, has Sybiha acknowledged those talks.
An interesting detail: Anita Orbán, returning from New York, suddenly gave an interview about Ukraine to the opposition (that is, pro-Orbán) outlet Index. The main signals: Hungary may reconsider its position on the Carpathian format — in return there are positive shifts on national minorities. She did not specify what those shifts were.
European Pravda, based on conversations with several sources, reconstructed the contours of the agreement.
Its achievement was not limited to Foreign Ministry–level talks. The EU-integration track was even more intensive, where Anita Orbán’s opposite number is Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister for European Integration Vsevolod Chenstov. "Chenstov is now communicating with Anita so much that he has probably already learned Hungarian," one of EuroPravda’s interlocutors joked recently.
These negotiations, focused on the issues and conditions of Ukraine’s path to the EU, began before the Carpathian summit.
The scandal initiated by Péter Madyar interrupted them, but the dialogue later resumed. Several interlocutors claim that this resumption was one of the key outcomes of the talks with Sybiha in New York.
After that, talks on European specifics began.
And it was not only about an action plan, but about a new approach to relations. "We seek to build trust with Hungary. For that we need concrete practical actions from both sides," Vice Prime Minister Chenstov explains.
Exchange plan for Ukraine and Hungary
Chenstov’s words about the need to build trust between the parties are not accidental. Currently the details of the agreement indicate a lack of even basic trust.
There are many reasons for this.
And it is not only the recent harsh accusations from the Hungarian side, after which it is hard to talk about trust. Previous actions also matter — for example, in Kyiv they are convinced that the current Hungarian government broke its promise regarding opening all clusters. Also significant is the anti-Ukrainian sentiment among part of the Hungarian electorate.
"Orbán for 16 years explained to the Hungarian people that Ukraine is the enemy. And he really convinced some people. 'Rewinding' that will take a long time, especially considering that Madyar wants to attract Orbán’s voters," one EP interlocutor explains.
In broad strokes the "deal" between Kyiv and Budapest sounds simple.
Ukraine pledged to adopt amendments to the Law "On Education" agreed with representatives of various national minorities. This is not a new obligation. For the EU, minority issues are fundamental, and these specific changes are written into the "roadmap," which is one of the official benchmarks of the accession process.
In turn, Hungary pledged to open two more clusters in negotiations on Ukraine’s EU accession. And this is also not a new obligation for the Hungarians — they promised to lift the veto back in June when the same roadmap was agreed.
But recall that there is not even close to full trust between the capitals.
Therefore, to implement the agreement they built a scheme in which the two countries move toward the goal in parallel, step by step, while leaving the possibility to "bail out" if partners break their promise.
The first public step, by agreement, was to be taken by Ukraine: and it did.
A draft of amendments to the law appeared in parliament. Formally it was registered by deputies — the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada and relevant committees. But in reality the government worked on this document jointly with parliamentarians, agreeing it with minorities (not only the Hungarian one).
The next step must be taken by Hungary.
On 6 October at a meeting of the working body on EU enlargement, abbreviated COELA, the Hungarians will give consent for the Irish presidency to send a letter to Ukraine asking it to provide the EU with its negotiation positions on clusters No.2 and No.3 ("Internal Market" and "Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth").
It sounds like a deeply technical decision, but it is precisely this bureaucratic step that Hungary had been vetoing, thus blocking the opening of the clusters.
Step by step the EU and Ukraine will proceed through further technical procedures. Ukraine will prepare the law for adoption in the Verkhovna Rada. Hungary will allow the next steps toward opening the clusters. The meeting of the Council of the European Union, where the final decision should be made, will take place in Brussels on 13 October. Before that, the Ukrainian parliament must approve the law.
To meet this schedule, the Verkhovna Rada will be forced to convene an extraordinary session on 12 October and adopt the amendments to the Law "On Education" immediately in first reading and in full.
"We hope that on 12 October the law will be adopted, which will allow the second and third clusters to be opened before the European Council meeting scheduled for 15 October. That European Council will, among other things, be devoted to enlargement issues. Therefore opening clusters with Ukraine and Moldova will be a strong signal that both the EU and the candidate countries take their commitments seriously," he added.
This is a very tight calendar. For the Verkhovna Rada, adopting a law a week after submission is super fast. A failure or postponement of the parliamentary vote would mean the collapse of the entire process.
But there is a high degree of confidence that there will be no surprises here. The votes are available.
Changes not only for Hungary and without harm to Ukraine
We will also explain what exactly must change.
The main ideas of the draft law have been unchanged for several years — Kyiv promised Orbán before the full-scale war to introduce targeted amendments to the education law to take into account concerns raised by representatives of the Hungarian minority. Similar requests also came from the Romanian national minority, which speaks less publicly but also expects certain corrections from Ukraine as a condition for further rapprochement with the EU.
And now the draft law was also shared with the Romanian minority and with Bucharest, Romanian sources of European Pravda say. The Foreign Ministry emphasizes that this cannot be called a "Hungarian law." "It will concern not only the Hungarian minority, but all minorities living in Ukraine," Sybiha said in a comment to European Pravda on Thursday. He did, however, remind of an exception: this cannot in principle apply to the Russian language.
But because Hungary defended these norms more actively than other EU states, the concrete agreements were reached primarily with it.
Detailed outlines of what Kyiv must do were agreed at the EU level back in June, before the opening of the first cluster. EP described this in the article "Not only about Zakarpattia."
For now the law concerns only educational points.
The main change is the introduction of the status of a national minority school.
Mykyta Poturayev, chair of the Verkhovna Rada committee on humanitarian and information policy and a co-author of the draft law, says that at the final stage there was a dispute with the Hungarians over two points — and on both a compromise satisfying Kyiv, the Hungarian minority, and Budapest was found.
The first question was what the threshold is for a school to obtain the status of a "national minority school."
"We agreed with our Hungarian partners that it is 50%+1 of students. But if later the number of students receiving education in Hungarian decreases, that does not mean automatic revocation of the status: it is automatically retained down to 20%. And only then, following consultations, can the status be reviewed. Or it may not be," the deputy said.
The second provision, which long caused debate, concerns the obligation for heads of national minority schools to obtain a certificate of proficiency in Ukrainian. The compromise here was an exception for those directors who already hold their positions.
Another important provision for Hungarians, on which there was no objection from the start, is the legislated right of children to speak their language during breaks or other activities.
There is also a principled innovation not related to Hungary.
The law will specify that a national minority school concerns not only EU languages but also the languages of indigenous peoples — that is, Crimean Tatar. It is quite possible that this latter category will be supplemented by the Gagauz language, which meets the requirements of indigenous languages but somehow was overlooked previously when parliament adopted the relevant law.
Looser rules apply to indigenous peoples: for example, a school can obtain the status of Crimean Tatar with only one class taught in that minority’s language.
Poturayev is confident that there will be votes for this law. "The hall will vote," he assured European Pravda.
Support for this is also indicated by the willingness of other groups to back the law. In particular, Volodymyr Viatrovych, a consistent defender of legislative protection of the Ukrainian language, agreed to support it. He told EP that deputies were involved in finalizing the law, which allowed the document to be brought to an acceptable form.
"We removed the main dangers. The law in its current edition is not dangerous, so I plan to vote for it. And I mean voting both in the first reading and in full immediately," he said.
It is also being discussed whether to adopt, together with these amendments to the Law "On Education," previously registered bills to strengthen the protection of the Ukrainian language. However that decision has not yet been made.
What next?
As already mentioned, successful implementation of the plan — that is, adoption of the Law "On Education" and opening of two clusters in the EU accession negotiations for Ukraine — will not be the end of the process.
However, it will make it possible to exit the prolonged crisis in Ukraine–Hungary relations and change the approach to those relations.
At minimum, it can be said that the approach of official Budapest has indeed changed over the past couple of weeks. Even the way these draft laws were agreed, despite parliamentary amendments to them, indicates that the Hungarian authorities finally realized the need to reach an agreement and abandoned unconditional blocking "in the Orbán style."
There is also hope among diplomats involved in the process that this will unblock a meeting at the highest level — between Volodymyr Zelensky and Péter Madyar. The Hungarian prime minister will get the chance to tell his voters that he achieved something in relations with Ukraine that Orbán could not.
Additionally, resolving the most urgent minority issue will allow leaders to focus on other, less toxic problems in relations.
And for Ukraine it is important that our EU accession does not encounter a new blockade.
No one says this publicly, but it seems that a leaders’ meeting will be necessary to lift the veto also from the last two clusters in the accession talks — provided, of course, that the current stage of the agreement is implemented successfully.
"We are fulfilling our obligations. And this should be reflected also in the progress of accession negotiations," says Vsevolod Chenstov, adding: "We expect that the remaining clusters will be opened by the end of the year."
Author: Serhiy Sydorenko
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Україна та Угорщина домовилися про вихід із кризи: Будапешт готовий розблокувати два кластери вступу до ЄС". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ANTIKOR.
