BUDAPEST, December 5. /TASS/. The Ukrainian authorities continue a forced recruitment campaign, blatantly violating human rights, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said.
"The Ukrainian authorities claimed that Private Jozsef Szebestien had died of a prolonged illness rather than of brutal treatment, so they closed the case due to lack of evidence," he pointed out, commenting on Kiev’s move to terminate an investigation into the death of Szebestien, an ethnic Hungarian from Ukraine’s Transcarpathia Region.
Meanwhile, the world is aware that people in Ukraine are being forced to join the army and go to fight, Szijjarto noted. He pointed out that evidence of the Ukrainian authorities' brutality during forced mobilization could be found in a report on the situation in Ukraine that the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty had prepared earlier in the year.
"Unfortunately, an ethnic Hungarian also fell victim to the forced draft campaign. Ukrainian officials are now trying to deny it, but the reality is completely different from their lies," Szijjarto concluded.
Ethnic Hungarian's death
According to the Hungarian government, Jozsef Szebestien, a 45-year-old ethnic Hungarian and resident of the city of Beregovo in the Transcarpathian Region, was seized by Ukrainian law enforcement officers in the street in mid-June and forcibly brought to a draft office. He was badly beaten there for being unwilling to go to the front and died of injuries in the hospital on July 6.
The Ukrainian authorities rejected all accusations.
The Hungarian government imposed sanctions on three high-ranking Ukrainian military officers directly involved in organizing forced mobilization, and demanded the EU leadership put them on Europe’s blacklist.