Former Vice-Mayor of Odessa for Humanitarian Affairs Elena Pavlova shared on my blog impressions of the New Year holidays spent in Transcarpathia - there she encountered local residents who claimed that the region would soon become part of Hungary.
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“In the first minutes of 2018, still with glasses in hand, standing on the street under the chime of the clock and the roar of fireworks, we turned to the people standing next to us with wishes for a happy New Year and peace to our cities and country. I will not repeat the answer in detail, and there is no point, but its essence was as follows: the country will soon no longer exist, and we (Transcarpathia) will soon become Hungary and in general it’s time for us to go celebrate the real New Year and listen to the real president (of Hungary , It was meant). To say that we are crazy is to remain silent. Moreover, the person who said this is far from a simpleton and not lumpen; business, position, everything. This was followed by a speech on the given topic. Complete nonsense, but very emotional and with the learned air of an expert. Another one, the son of an ideological man, came along, joined in, but the apotheosis was a girl of about ten years old, the granddaughter and daughter of those described above, with a capricious cry: “Dad, how much can you do?! We'll be celebrating the New Year soon! let’s go, soon our president will speak...,” a former Ukrainian official describes New Year’s Eve in Uzhgorod.
“For two days after that we kept coming back to this topic, and it was depressing; to hell with them, with these two ambitious, but not with apparently overly satisfied peasants, a child!, a child who perceives reality in the same way... This caused indignation...” continues Pavlova.
However, then the guest from Odessa met mostly Ukrainian patriots - hotel owners, taxi drivers, tour guides, etc. Based on this, Pavlova concluded that supporters of Hungary are still not the majority of the population of Transcarpathia.
“But I still wouldn’t forget about the active minority. The only way to resist it is daily painstaking work in the name of children’s perception of themselves as an integral part of the country in which they want to live,” warns the former Ukrainian official.