Hungary is Trying to Mend Fences With Ukraine

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

The April 12 parliamentary election in Hungary saw the victory of a new prime minister, Peter Magyar, defeating Victor Orban’s right-wing Fidesz–KDNP alliance. Magyar’s centre-right Tisza Party took 138 of 199 seats, and more than 53 per cent of the vote. It stood on a platform of distancing Hungary from Russia in favour of more cordial ties with the European Union and Ukraine. This has now begun to take shape.

Magyar on June 3 announced a shift in Hungarian policy toward Ukraine that he described as “historic. In three weeks, we managed to achieve what Viktor Orban couldn’t do in 10 years,” Magyar said. The two countries have reached an agreement on the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority in the western Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia, particularly in education and language. The community is centered around the city of Berehove (Beregszasz) and surrounding border villages.

The rights of Ukraine’s Hungarian minority have been a longstanding source of tension between Kyiv and Budapest since the former adopted legislation strengthening the role of Ukrainian as the primary language of instruction in schools.

Under the new agreement Ukraine will enable the use of minority languages in public administration. This will lead to bilingual signs for place names or on government buildings. The use of minority languages will be permitted in public institutions if a minority constitutes over 10 per cent of the local population. Until now, that required special decisions by councils but now it will become automatic.

Minority schools will be maintained even if there are only a few children and young people left. The number of ethnic Hungarians in the region has declined dramatically, and estimates put it now at around 80,000, down from almost 160,000.

The agreement with Ukraine saw the Hungarian government agree to the opening negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union, something blocked by former prime minister Orban, who had described Ukraine as a mafia state teeming with human traffickers, drug dealers and arms merchants.

Though Magyar’s election victory ended Orban’s 16-year rule in April, the issue continues to resonate widely in Hungarian society. “The Hungarian community in Transcarpathia is not only an important part of the relationship between our two countries, but also a bridge between our nations,” stated Hungarian foreign minister Anita Orban.

Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister Andrii Sybiha has highlighted three issues on the agenda: bilateral relations, minority rights and Ukraine’s EU accession. “Ukraine wants to open a new, mutually beneficial chapter in our bilateral relations based on trust,” Sybiha stated. “Thanks to the historic choice made by the Hungarian people in April, Ukraine and Hungary now have an opportunity to open a new chapter in bilateral relations, based on good neighborliness, mutual respect, and a shared European future.

“There is no better guarantee of the rights of the Hungarian minority in Zakarpattia than Ukraine’s accession to the European Union. This serves the national interests of both our countries and peoples, strengthens Europe, and brings peace closer.”

Sybiha also shared a photo with all the participants present at the meeting, including a member of the Zakarpattia Regional Military Administration which represents the Transcarpathia region.

While there is no universally accepted definition of the territory’s boundaries, the contemporary Ukrainian administrative regions (oblasts) of Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Ternopil and Zakarpattia, which were part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War, are usually included.

Hungary lost these areas to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, and they were transferred to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, finally ending up in today’s Ukraine after the USSR collapsed in 1991. Two-thirds of Hungary’s area and population was taken by the neighbouring countries in the 1920 treaty and millions of Hungarians found themselves living in foreign jurisdictions. Hungarian irredentist nationalists have ever since sought to reclaim the territories now in Ukraine, along with other regions lost to Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia, to recreate a Greater Hungary.

In 2011 Orban passed a law that made it possible for all Hungarian-speaking descendants of citizens from the country’s pre-Trianon borders to claim Hungarian citizenship. A national Unity Day was also introduced to commemorate Hungary’s territorial losses at Trianon. In 2022 Orban attendance a soccer match sporting a scarf that depicted a map of Hungary with the borders it had before the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

Magyar, unlike Orban, seems willing to accept Kyiv’s rule in Transcarpathia as long as Hungarian minority rights are guaranteed, and he sees this new deal as a precondition to Budapest giving consent “to the opening of the first accession cluster in Ukraine’s EU membership negotiations.”

Laszlo Zubanics, one of the most prominent figures of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia and the head of the Hungarian Democratic Federation in Ukraine, called this “a very important and truly historic step.”

But the EU may not open all the negotiations for Ukraine right away, as sought by Kyiv. While Magyar lifted his country’s longstanding veto in early June, he has now signalled his opposition to speeding up Ukraine’s membership bid.

 Because of Hungary’s past behaviour, its neighbours perceive any act of concern over the fate of its diaspora as a sign of nascent irredentism. Will this agreement with Ukraine, by a new prime minister, lessen tensions in central Europe?

 

For Iran, Hezbollah Remains Indispensable

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

During the latest Mideast conflict, Tehran has signaled that its red lines extend far beyond its borders. On June 7, that point was driven home with force. An Israeli strike that hit Beirut’s southern suburbs was followed by Iran launching multiple waves of ballistic missiles toward Israel, the first direct attack on that nation since April.  Iran’s leadership and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are increasingly willing to accept greater risks in a bid to project power across the region.

Lebanon, and Hezbollah in particular, remain among Iran’s most important red lines in any potential agreement with the United States. Hezbollah is not merely a political or military ally but an integral component of its long-term strategic vision for the Middle East. It is part of a partnership forged over decades.

Muhammad Javad Habibi, a political scientist and contributor to the Tehran Times, feels that the war has fundamentally altered how Iranian policymakers understand future confrontations with the United States and Israel.

“The recent war appears to have strengthened a belief among many Iranian policymakers that future confrontations with the United States and Israel will not be limited to a single battlefield or a single issue,” Habibi told the left-wing American news website Mondoweiss.

“From Tehran’s perspective, the conflict demonstrated that military pressure, economic pressure, information campaigns, and diplomatic pressure are increasingly being applied simultaneously. As a result, Iranian decision-makers appear less willing than before to compartmentalize regional alliances and security concerns from negotiations,” Habibi stated.

That helps explain why Lebanon has moved closer to the centre of Iran’s strategic calculations. Iran’s support for Hezbollah is a signal to allies and would-be partners: Tehran will not abandon you. Support for Hezbollah is tied not only to military considerations but also to credibility.

Like other regional and global powers, Iran relies not only on military capabilities but also on its reputation for standing by its allies. From this perspective, support for Hezbollah is about maintaining a regional network that policymakers consider essential to Iran’s deterrence posture.

Lebanon is more than a regional flashpoint. It is emerging as a test case for a broader Iranian effort to redefine the terms on which future negotiations with Washington will be conducted.

“The issue of Lebanon is not only related to Iran,” according to Farshad Shariat, a professor of political science at Imam Sadiq University in Tehran. “It concerns the broader Islamic world.” Developments in Lebanon, Shariat told Mondoweiss, are often viewed by Iranian political elites as part of a wider struggle over sovereignty, foreign intervention, and the future direction of the region.

Since it’s unlikely that Hezbollah will give up its war against Israel, one that the Lebanese government is incapable of stopping, Israel’s ongoing campaign is unlikely to end anytime soon. And so the Israeli war with Iran will continue in some form, regardless of whether Washington and Tehran stop fighting.

Disarmament was the purpose in theory of the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah that the Iranian proxy violated at the beginning of the current war. But that task was left to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which proved they were not up to the job. The man in charge of the LAF, General Rodolphe Haykal, has been politically aligned with Hezbollah for years. Obviously, Israel is in no mood to trust its security to the promises of weak politicians in Beirut.

Hezbollah’s power rests with Lebanon’s Shia Muslim population, which before the 1980s was by far the poorest and most marginalized community in the state. That began to change when Imam Musa al-Sadr emerged as a prominent advocate for greater Shia political recognition and socio-economic development. He became one of the leading social and political figures within the Shia community, founding the Amal Movement, before his disappearance in Libya in 1978. 

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Tehran deployed operatives of the IRGC to Lebanon to establish Hezbollah amid the country’s civil war. Hezbollah and Amal emerged as the dominant representatives of the Shia community and political heavyweights in Lebanon. 

Hezbollah’s power rests not only on its military apparatus, but also in its ability to maintain extensive patronage networks throughout Lebanese institutions. Since the 1992 parliamentary elections, the Amal Movement and Hezbollah have largely commanded the 27 seats in the parliament reserved for Shia Muslims.

“There is Shia opposition, but we still do not see a real structured political opposition with a vision and a project,” Bashshar Haydar, professor of philosophy and the Mohammad Atallah chair of ethics at the American University of Beirut, told the news website This is Beirut. 

Amid escalating fighting with Israel, Hezbollah’s ability to mobilize its traditional support base may be weakening, Mona Fayad, added professor of psychology at the Lebanese University. The main obstacle facing the Shia opposition is the social and psychological legacy of Hezbollah’s decades-long dominance. This requires overcoming fear. Only then, she contends, can a sustainable Shia opposition take shape, one that can both challenge Hezbollah and offer a credible alternative to the system that has sustained it for decades.

While Hezbollah’s capacity to mobilize its base has visibly declined, those Shia who challenge the party remain vulnerable, reinforcing the need for institutional protection. Until that changes, Hezbollah will continue to rule southern Lebanon as an Iranian proxy.