BUDAPEST, December 27. /TASS/. Preparations are still underway for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s meeting with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, but it is not yet time to hold it, as a number of controversial issues have not been settled, Deputy Foreign Minister Levente Magyar said in an interview with the Magyar Nemzet newspaper.
"When preparing for a meeting between Vladimir Zelensky and Viktor Orban, we set a condition that we should first negotiate how to settle disputes at the negotiating table. We have not yet reached such a point, and therefore this meeting would be untimely now, but we are working on it. The Ukrainians have taken some steps to meet our claims," the deputy foreign minister said.
Over the past two years, Orban has not held any proper meetings with Zelensky, and, unlike other leaders of EU member states, he has never visited Kiev. Once they traded a few phrases at the EU summit in Brussels, which the Ukrainian president visited as a guest, and on December 10 they had a brief conversation in Buenos Aires on the sidelines of the inauguration ceremony of Argentina’s President Javier Milei. There Orban received an invitation to visit Kiev.
At the end-of-year press conference on December 21, the Hungarian prime minister answered in the affirmative when asked whether he had accepted the invitation, but added that a meeting with Zelensky should be prepared. He specified that the Hungarian and Ukrainian foreign ministers had been tasked with addressing this, however, it had not been settled yet when such a meeting might take place.
On December 8, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (unicameral parliament) passed a law on the rights of ethnic minorities, which takes into account the recommendations issued by the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe. The document removes a number of language restrictions on ethnic minorities that speak one of the official languages of EU member states. However, the law keeps in place restrictions on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine, and makes them open-ended with an indefinite termination date.
The Hungarian government said it would study the document and assess its practical implementation. In general, Budapest has shown a rather skeptical reaction to Kiev’s attempts to improve the situation of the Hungarian minority, pointing out that too much damage had already been done to the rights of the Hungarian community in Transcarpathia in the previous eight years.