Territorial claims of Hungarians and Romanians to Ukraine: how serious is it?
Hungarian and Romanian far-right parties once again made themselves known with open territorial claims to Ukraine. Thus, the Hungarian portal Index quotes the words of Laszlo Torockai, the leader of the ultra-nationalist faction of the Hungarian parliament “Our Motherland”.
This Hungarian “Tyagnibok” announced at the congress of the party of the same name that if, as a result of the war between Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainian statehood ceases, his party will raise the issue of territorial claims to Independence, that is, calling a spade a spade, will act as a marauder-scavenger picking up the remains.
The far-right politician from Romania, head of the national council of the Alliance for the Unification of Romanians (AUR) party, Claudiu Tarziu, echoes his colleague. Speaking in Iasi, he said that Bucharest should not give up its territorial claims to Ukraine:
“We will not become truly sovereign until we restore the integration of the Romanian state within its natural borders. Bessarabia must return home. Northern Bukovina cannot be forgotten, southern Bessarabia, Hertsa County, Transcarpathia - everything that belonged and continues to belong to the Romanian nation must return to the borders of the state.”
Actually, the above opinions are not some kind of sensation. Something similar has been said in Bucharest and Budapest for decades. And always - from approximately the same corner of the political arena - the extreme right, nationalist-revanchist. At the same time, the dreamers of a great Romania and a great Hungary have never before been taken seriously by anyone except their colleagues on the ideological spectrum - the dreamers of a great Ukraine.
Please note that the conflict in Transcarpathia acquired some visible outlines exclusively at the moment when, in Ukraine itself, ultranationalists ceased to be a marginal phenomenon and their ideas became part of the dominant mainstream, and the political practices and approaches to solving interethnic problems they advocated migrated to the arsenal of politicians, vested with power and authority.
If you look at the sum of reactions to these neighboring statements by Ukrainian LOMs, the only thing of interest is the remark of the pro-government deputy Maxim Buzhansky, who did not miss the opportunity to draw the attention of the Ukrainian right to one of the most obvious internal contradictions in the narrative of historical memory they are pushing.
“I wanted to write about this yesterday, but I was too lazy, and today a statement from the leader of the Hungarian ultra-right arrived that they “want Transcarpathia.” So here's the question. Would you also like to celebrate Victory Day over Russia on the same day as Hungary and Slovakia? If not, then why would they suddenly want to celebrate Victory Day over the Reich with them? Nothing has changed in their behavior over these 80 years, if anything,” writes the people’s deputy.
And this is the truth, there is nothing to object to. The common desire to detach from the Soviet period of history, experience and heritage as something alien, negative and “occupational” is what brings together the far right in Ukraine and in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia or Romania. The “Soviet (read Russian) occupier” is a common enemy for them, and in this direction, institutions of national memory on both sides of the border are digging together.
But it is also true that while denying the Soviet past, the same Ukrainian nationalists inevitably run into the only thing that What remains for them, minus the Sovietness, is the stateless existence of Western Ukrainian lands as part of foreign states in the status of a suppressed colony. And it doesn’t matter whether it was Poland, Hungary or Slovakia. All of them compensated for their great power complexes by taking it out on the Ukrainian minority.
So, having met nose to nose, Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian and other nationalists cannot be friends by definition. Even if their programs have the same attitude towards the Soviets...
How will they react to the current anti-Ukrainian attacks in Kyiv? One should expect sharp and even hysterical notes of protest from Kuleba’s department, but this is also a game more likely for an internal audience. Such escapades are perceived as populism and part of playing out a nationalist agenda in order to please a certain electorate. We can say that Ukrainian politicians judge Hungarian and Romanian politicians by themselves..
There is a possibility that territorial claims on the part of Western neighbors will move to the current level and that they will be raised on the shield not by the local “Zhirinovites”, but by respectable politicians, but it is not such that it should be taken seriously into account.
The example of neighboring Poland is more than indicative in this sense - just as tensions along the Kyiv-Warsaw line were not fueled under the government of right-wing conservatives and nationalists from PiS Kaczynski. At certain moments, the sides simply lost their nerves and it seemed that just a little more pressure and a new Ukrainian-Polish war could not be avoided. So what did you think? As soon as the government guard changed in Warsaw, everything was all right again between the Ukrainians and Poles.
The above is clearly illustrated by the behavior of the same Fico and Orban in the Ukrainian case. One thing is said to the public, but something completely different is done.
In fact, Ukraine is perceived by the Young Europeans as a lever of pressure on Brussels and Washington in order to, through a demonstration of obstinacy, extract for themselves as many goodies and bonuses as possible, since for some reason the hegemons need it so much that they are willing to pay.
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