The leader of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, Hunor Kelemen, was denied entry into the territory of Ukraine and was subsequently banned from crossing the border for a year and a half.
Activist about this сообщил on his Facebook page, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
He was heading to Uzhgorod for events to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the local organization - the Society of Hungarian Culture of Transcarpathia.
According to Kelemen, he waited at the checkpoint for about an hour, after which he was denied entry by Ukrainian border guards, who stamped his passport accordingly.
“They denied me the right to enter the country without any explanation. They simply said that I could not cross the border,” he wrote on Facebook.
Following the incident, there was an immediate reaction from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ambassador of Ukraine to Hungary Lyubov Nepop was summoned for a conversation, in which the press secretary of the diplomatic department called the act of the Ukrainian side unacceptable and anti-Hungarian.
At the same time, the Ambassador of Ukraine to Romania Alexander Bankov made a statement according to which the activist had previously been prohibited from entering Ukraine, but he tried to cross the border with a passport from another state.
“Mr. Kelemen Hunor has been prohibited from entering the territory of Ukraine since November 03.11.2017, XNUMX. Since that time, he had already tried to enter Ukraine with a Hungarian passport and was refused, so he knew exactly about the decision made by the Ukrainian side,” the diplomat claims on his Facebook page.
However, Hunor Kelemen hurried disprove this statement.
“Alexander Bankov, the Ukrainian Ambassador in Bucharest, is mistaken when he says that I previously tried to enter Ukraine with a Hungarian passport. I have not been to Ukraine for the last twenty years and have never used a Hungarian passport. I can provide documents from today's incident. “I ask the Ambassador of Ukraine in Bucharest, Alexander Bankov, to present similar documents prohibiting my intended entry,” he replied.
Transcarpathian political scientist Dmitry Tuzhansky also commented on the incident on the ZIK TV channel.
“Hunor Kelemen is not some random person, he is not a fringe figure, not an oppositionist, he is the leader of the largest foreign Hungarian community, that is, he is a person who very often personally meets with Viktor Orban (Prime Minister of Hungary - ed. ). This is a serious person from Budapest, and Budapest will not turn a blind eye to this for any reason. Indeed, this is a problem, our relations with Hungary are now so problematic that this is not the biggest problem, but this is another problem that we, unfortunately, will have to solve,” the expert concluded.
It is noteworthy that in the photo of the passport page published by Kelemen on Facebook, the inscription on the Ukrainian stamp states that the ban was issued for a period of three years, but it is written that it lasts from April 6, 2019 to October 13, 2020. One can only guess whether the Ukrainian border guards made such a mistake on purpose.